Socially-mediated branding: identify yourself

If one did a semantic analysis of the language I use in my blog posts of late, I'd not be surprised if two of the words I use most are "many" and "different." I much prefer many and different to "one" and "the same." Which is where I think there are some ideas worth noting about identity online. Identity says to me "one" and "the same."

We think of identity as the identity of a person. But people are far from one thing only, just as identity is far from always the same. In fact we could debate, and many do, whether or not there even is such a thing as identity.

It's been said, I don't recall by whom, that we experience ourselves as complex and differentiated, but that we see others as whole. I don't know if this tendency also permeates how we think of users and consumers. But in the interest of pushing a little on the assumptions we in social media make about the user and his or her interests, I'd like to unpack this a bit.

Philosophically, I'm more interested in becoming than being. Much more interesting, to me, is not the identity of who we are, but the question of how we become. For we become not by staying the same, but by relating to something different. If identity is a valid concept, then to me it is still a process. If identity ever "is," then it becomes so by identifying.

The aims of socially-mediated branding are to capitalize on the many and different ways in which companies can leverage relationships. Relationships through which consumers identify themselves, with or through a brand, friends and peers, values, and other kinds of interests.

The relationship is formed on the basis of identifying with something. This might be the brand itself, or its products, but also its principles, reputation, or values. In the case of a popular brand, and a lifestyle brand in particular, this relation usually involves relating to social perceptions of the brand.

Brand identity is not how the brand sees itself but how consumers relate to it: how they identify with it, and which facet or brand attribute it is that interests them (again: product, brand, values, reputation, etc).

Let's take the example of a user interested in a football team. We say the fan identifies with the team. If this fan is a particularly fanatic one, then this identification may even be called an identity. It's not who the person is, but how he or she sees themselves.

Identity might also be how the person represents him or herself to others, may be clear in how they talk, and will most certainly be involved in who they relate to and how. Other fans will be said to have the same identity. Fans relate to each other as fans of the same team, sharing a common identity.

Identity then is social. How we see ourselves is social. We see our own identities reflected in the social scenes we relate to and with which we identify. It's never enough to ask "what's the consumer's passion" and stop there. Passion is social. It is expressed in how the person relates to others and to the social world of things that he or she identifies with.

We have left the information age and are now in the age of communication. That's where our technologies and "industries" currently show much of the most interesting innovation. And in this age of rapidly socializing media, communication itself becomes a commodity.

Online talk, once it's been captured, can be circulated and distributed, and can attract the value and attention that drives non-money social economies. As social currency spent, and as social capital accumulated, communication on social media represents a very disruptive shift to the uses of media for marketing, branding, and sales.

Whether we like it or not, the commodification of communication by means of social media will be used. It will be used to the consumer's advantage, in some cases and by some brands. And exploited in others. This is how media work, when bound to the math of the bottom line.

As users identify themselves by means of media, as their relationships expose both individual tastes and preferences, as well as social affinities and common social identities, we should be advised that identity is not a fixed property. It is a work in progress and always in play. A dynamic of social identifications by which many and different relationships take shape through interactions and communication.

Brand identities, too, are socially determined. And brands interested in socially-mediated branding would be well advised to spend less on their identity. The brand's view of its identity is not the same as the consumer's. Brands, instead of communicating their identity, and identifying themselves, would do well to embrace the dynamic of identity through identification. Which is, in short, to identify with their consumers.

Newspaper culture, authority, social media, and relevance

Stowe Boyd has an excellent post today on social news. While at first I was going to just leave a comment, my thoughts ascended from commentary to a post in their own right. Not wanting to blogjack Stowe's points, I'd like to continue the conversation by means of referencing the debate around newsprint's decline and the economic threat to journalism here instead.

As I see it the problem facing traditional news media is not just a problem of old media, new media. Indeed, as McLuhan argued, any new medium initially uses an old medium as its content. Old media methods and practices aren't about to disappear simply because attention is shifting increasingly to social media — a consequence of changing reading habits, advertising budgets, expenses and costs of maintaining and print publication in challenging credit markets, a shift from time spent by consumers in print and television to internet-based experiences, and so on.

All those forces are real and are exacting a punishing toll on traditional media, of course. But there's another paradigm shift in the works, and it has less to do with economic forces and more to do with the very social and cultural function of news.

News is not simply reported; it is produced. News media create the news. Their reporting not only documents facts, but through processes of editorial, publishing, and distribution, it also creates the news. The legitimacy of traditional media rested on the authority news media brought to this process. This authority in turn comprised of several "social functions," if you will. For there were different ways in which news media established their positions, defined their roles, and maintained their market leadership and service:

Authority can be had by means of reputation. This is a perception issue, and is maintained by consistent adherence by news organizations to internal (brand) principles, commitments, interests, style, judgment, taste, truth, personality, accuracy, speed, and so on. In this way news organizations might each command a different reputation, a brand identified with authority of a kind, or in a field, or within a genre. In other words authority can be had by a news media leader regardless of its actual credibility and service as a news gathering and reporting organization.

Left of center, right of center, news "lite," — the audience of readers either buys it, and thus legitimizes the organization's authority, or not. This point is important because we should separate authority from the "truth" of reporting events, and the "fact" of news itself. News is created: the process is owned by for profit institutions, and seeks market share and financial performance. News is never just an objective recording of events, but is always a selection and narration of events.

Authority can be had by means of position. This is a general perspective on authority. It claims simply that an authoritative social position bestows authority on the organization, entity, or individual who occupies the position. From a cultural and historical perspective, new media have long occupied a traditional position of delivering timely, relevant, significant, and objective reporting of events, topics, issues, and perspectives. This tradition is surely changing — not only because news media are no longer the best first source of news itself, but because other media (social) compete for the position of authority.

This argument does not claim that social media are better or more accurate, faster or more honest — these are some claims made by citizen journalists and I agree with many of them — it simply claims that authority is a social and cultural function, and that the function can be fulfilled by different entities. (Functionalism argues that the function remains relatively stable, but who fulfills the function is interchangeable.)

There are other ways of defining authority, but I'll leave those aside as they relate more to contexts in which power and force are in play. Now, there's an interesting change taking place in the migration of consumers from mainstream media to social media. It's not just in the content, the communication and "conversation," the social networking and personalization of media, but does involve all of these. We might characterize it more broadly as a change in modes of consumption and modes of production. And here it is where traditional media are at a distinct and overwhelming disadvantage, for their medium of choice is the wrong medium.

In the traditional medium, value is added to news by the production of news as a news medium for mass consumption. The work of producing news was the work that created value for the news organization, and which is consumed by readers and viewers. The mode of production of news was separate from the consumption of news. Social media, by contrast, involve consumers in the process of value creation. The mode of production is also the mode of consumption. There's no distance separating the two: distance that normally permits the transaction fees that cover distribution, circulation, and broadcast.

Furthermore, the value determined in traditional journalism by means of authority as described above, is now determined instead by means of social communication and interaction. This leads to a shift in the value itself: from the editorial voice and authority of journalism to the personal and social relevance of friends, colleagues, and other social relations. Value is no longer measured in degrees of authority but in degrees of relevance. Note the distinction, for there's no underestimating the significance of this shift. It's a change that, for better or worse, re-calibrates the consumer's interest in and consumption of news.

News is no longer "that which is important" and is now "that which is socially relevant." Social relevance rests not on value as determined by a scale or hierarchy of significance (what's worth telling, objectively assessed) but that which is distributed, shared, retold, cited, referenced, quoted, linked to, favorited, and otherwise socially ranked and delivered. Value of news in social media accrues by means of speed, distribution, reach and leveraged influence of individuals who get attention by means of paying attention. Value is a matter of "who chooses" not "what is worth choosing."

This shift from an editorial and journalistic version of objectivity — closely wed to the perception of an authoritative voice occupying an authoritative role &dash: to a unregulated, communicative production of value that is individually and subjectively chosen and socially proliferated constitutes an enormous rebalancing of media landscape. Not only are old media disadvantaged for their medium is non-social and non-communicative, but they are losing their authority and their traditional role occupying that authority. It is really only up to social media to better filter out noise, personalize news and content consumption, continually improve relational controls (friends, peers, colleagues — the whole personal/social/public thing), innovate interaction models to raise the medium's unique production value, and fine tune advertising business models for sustainability.

It seems to me unlikely that we will return, as a culture, to traditional modes of consuming news. There will always be a need for experts, a respect for their credibility and reputation, and interest in voices that can tell, narrate, and entertain. Those skills are platform agnostic. But the genie's out of the bottle. Regardless of how one feels about the quality of user-generated content, the noise of social media and irrelevance of much of its content, the most profound distinction between old and new media is in the relationship between production and consumption. New media content is sourced and distributed by means of social relations. It seems very unlikely that a culture would wish a return to the hierarchy of authority, when the proximity and immediacy of social media offer much of the same information, selected in a fundamentally different way.

Transparency: truth in social media

I consider social media to be talk technologies, and I've been suspecting of late that the debate around "transparency" is a debate about communication. I say this only because transparency is sometimes used to describe branding, advertising, PR, marketing, corporate behavior, and of course, use of social media. All of these activities can possibly benefit, or suffer, from transparency.

Think of transparency and you see clarity. You see through the foil, the "grand gestures" (Deb Shultz), and the clever tactics of corporate marketing and PR. Transparency then describes how a brand relates to its cusomtomers.

Transparency certainly involves a company's interactions with its customers. This impacts the customer's experience, and thus idea, of the brand. From the customer's perspective, you get what you see, and what you ask for, you sometimes get also. We sometimes call this authenticity, meaning that a company is sincere in its customer relationships and communication.

Company walls, too, become transparent &emdash; if not on the inside, then on the outside. Company disclosure is an element of transparency: companies that no longer try to conceal their inner workings, or which are "open" to sharing their activities with the outside world, are transparent. This kind of transparency involves the visibility of company actviities.

Then there is customer service. This, too, is a key feature in the new transparency. Here it generally means treating customers with respect, fairly and responsively (in a timely manner). This involves a kind of equality in relations, in the sense that, as the saying goes, the customer is always right. It's transparency because it puts the company in its right place: not above, but in the service of, the customer. This is the rightness, the justice, or fairness of relations.


To return to the beginning, then, I find these different accounts of transparency interesting because they all involve "truth." I deliberately avoid Colbert's infamous claim to "truthiness," because that is just the image of truth.

There are, in pragmatics (a branch of linguistics), three claims to truth made in all our communication:

• a claim to truth as fact (something is true about reality)


• a claim to truthfulness (somebody is sincere, means what s/he says)


• and a claim to authority (somebody is allowed to claim what s/he claims, e.g. has the social position or authority)

These aspects of truth in communication underlie the concept of transparency.

Transparency is:

• truth in brand communication and behavior: factual accuracy, full disclosure, no manipulation, denial, misrepresentation of the truth


• truthfulness in brand intent: authentic self-representation, genuine, sincere, and honest communication, behavior with integrity, respect, and understanding (including the listening part)


• truth as the right to speak and act: respect for laws and norms, codes of conduct, etiquette, shown by associating with the brand's own community, audience, and marketplace as an equal participant committed to a shared and common future, sustainably and compassionately

I suspected that transparency had something to do with communication when it became virtually interchangeable with authenticity. These are terms we use in describing people, and trust, especially. They apply to people because they involve intentions, actions, speech, behavior: human stuff, deeply social stuff.

We might in fact say that transparency is really about humanizing for-profit companies. That as professionals, and as consumers, we ask for transparency in corporate behavior because it is what we expect from state and government behavior: accountability. In other words, transparency is in the zeitgeist.

One final thought. For transparency is not all that it's cracked up to be, for all and at all times equally. As tax payers, it is a citizen's right to expect accountability in government actions.

Companies that sell products, and which use their brand reputation to do so, are paid by consumers for their products. There is no social contract, but an exchange of money. In other words, the brand that embraces transparency does so in its own self interest. I'm not saying that this invalidates corporate transparency, but that it complicates it. Social media may want to be used authentically. But companies and brands are unlikely to embrace full transparency.

Enterprise and Social Media: Ambient Knowledge, Hidden Knowledge

In the process of considering the differences between "regular" consumer social media, and social media in the enterprise, I've been turning over the idea of ambient intimacy vs ambient knowledge. I thought "knowledge" might not only capture the knowledge management trendline that continues to run through many internal enterprise software applications, but that it might also shift emphasis from social to organizational values. The idea of "ambient knowledge" came up around some webinars hosted by Ross Mayfield (@ross), Laura Fitton (@pistachio), and Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia). The term seemed to suit realtime social media in the enterprise well, namely twitter and, in this case, Socialtext and its Signals messaging platform.

But in the weeks since, the concept has been tumbling and turning over in my mind's eye. The "knowledge" part of it works for me still, but the "ambient," like an ill-fitting shirt drawn from the tumble drier too late, does not.

I went back to Leisa Reichelt's (@leisa) first use of the term ambient intimacy.

"Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight." Leisa Reichelt

Leisa's description is about awareness, access, visibility. These are provided by means of messaging and communication. "Ambient" here means a kind of passive connectedness and awareness; the metaphor is visual, specular, spatial. "Ambiance" refers to one's surroundings and place. Here, ambient intimacy hints at Wim Wenders' "Far Away, So Close," a film that is about intimacy, video, vision.

But where "ambient" suggests connectedness where there would otherwise be none, people within the organization are often connected: if not in fact and by virtue of a shared building, company identity, purpose and so on, then also by means of in-house technologies. The issue, as often noted in the knowledge management literature, is less a connectedness problem and more a problem of silos. Awareness, not of what people are up to but of who may have an answer.

Relationships within the organization are structured. They serve functional organization. Communication, too, tends to serve tasks, jobs, projects: communication coordinates activities.

The "awareness" problem, in terms of knowing and having access to knowledge that others have, seems more one of transparency and disclosure. And in the organization, the relationships that could be helped by use of social technologies are the latent relationships: those that could be functionally productive, if the employees knew of one another.

So I have been going with "hidden knowledge" instead of "ambient knowledge" of late.

Lee Bryant, in his (old) post Ambient Knowledge describes a feed and flow-based view of organizational social media use. The fact that this dates to 2005 seems to me, in fact, prescient.

Lee describes three directions for KM (Knowledge Management) as suggested by David Snowden:

• Techno-fetishism: where organisations focus on codification through technology solutions, which is little more than an advanced form of information management


• HR solutions: where it becomes a servant of recruitment, retention and succession policy, owned by HR and run by IT


• Sense making: where the focus is not on sharing knowledge but on enabling better decision making, creating the conditions for innovation and understanding the way we make sense of our world

Lee then reflects on the social interaction model, if you will, for a socialized KM:

"We need to let people organise their inputs by exposing all relevant information in granular feed form and then provide smart aggregation and tagging tools to create a personal eco-system of content, cues and links.

This is what we have been describing as a social interface to corporate information sources: create a layer of feeds and flows that reference content objects, and allow people to apply flexible personal meta-data within a social context to constantly reorganise the links into that content according to their day-to-day needs.

Second, we should help people develop the skills and confidence to move from linear processing mode, where they feel a need to respond to our acknowledge everything (e.g. memos and the email inbox) to peripheral vision mode, where people make better decisions and connections by assisted by ambient information feeds, and where information grabs our attention only when it needs to (e.g. "reading" in an RSS aggregator, sensing importance of links through number of references or recognised trust relationships)."

I think the passing emphasis on action, and on use of social tools to make what might be "ambient" (hidden) knowledge actionable (or connecting up latent relationships to make them actual) is important. Work is focused activity. Work done in part by talking uses talk to coordinate action and activity. Flow-based social media can supplement this kind of work: by routing, distributing, exposing and sharing communication differently. From email to a more transparent and visible kind of communication.

Transparency creates and opens possibilities: for reciprocity and recognition of shared goals and common purposes. It discloses bias and undermines (somewhat) structural tendencies (the schlerotic organizational body). It can work, using social media communication tools, in part because communication becomes more personal (in contrast to professional or employee role and position). And while this personalization may create risks for employees, it can produce coincidental and serendipitous openings. These are the benefits that accrue to activities not designed for their utility (productivity), but for their ability to weave and bind socially (social fabric).

This is where I'm at now with it. I'm still allowing the coincidence, serendipity, and social of social media to tumble about the cranium. I know that the "social" inside a company is not the social we normally mean by social media. But that'll be a separate post.

Social media metaphors: what do we mean to say?

The topic of metaphor came up the other evening over dinner with some friends. Metaphor, and social media in particular. We had gathered at the behest of Andreas Weigend with the express purpose of having an "intelligent conversation" about the social web. Not that most conversations are unintelligent or stupid. But that most are held only falteringly during events and at parties. Besides myself, Mark Plakias Jerry Michalski and Eric Doyle were also at the table.

I raised the matter of metaphor simply to kick off the conversation. I commented that I'd been trying to understand how it is that we talk about social media, emphasizing that how we talk about it often translates into our work: what we design, what we advise, how we analyze trends, and so on.

I mentioned that I'd been interested, too, in how industry leaders talk about social media, and in the sometimes subtle but meaningful differences between their terminologies. Brian Solis has been talking about publics (instead of audiences). Jason Falls talks about relationships.

(Sidenote: Brian talks about putting the public back in PR; Jason about putting relationships back in PR. Both are right, if understood through their own lens).

Tara Hunt's concept of Whuffie is a form of social capital, and related to one's personal brand and influence. Chris Heuer (of Adhocnium and Social Media Club fame) emphasizes the conversation, and if you know Chris, it is clear why. Stowe Boyd hews more closely to the network, or more accurately, its edges, where culture, technology, and social practices co-mingle and conspire to create new kinds of interactions.

I suppose these distinctions are obvious when you get to know these people and their work. I'm not psychologizing friends and colleagues here, but simply making a point about metaphor: we describe things as we see them. How we describe them shapes and informs what we think about them, and thus how we talk about them.

"We assume more than we know." -- David Hume
"A man's reach exceeds his grasp, or what's a metaphor?" -- Marshall McLuhan


Metaphors are ideas that substitute for other ideas. A metaphor is usually a linguistic concept whose meaning is both greater, more ambiguous, and more general than the concept it substitutes for.

There is nothing wrong with metaphors. But we can easily take them for fact, for objectivity, for reality, which they are not. They are expressions (and necessary ones). But when we describe phenomena like "social media" in terms of "relationships" "audiences," "publics," "trust," "conversation," "communication," "markets," and so on, we are in effect making claims built on foundations of sand. Those of us in social media describe it as we see it, emphasizing the actions, uses, insights, benefits, profits, trends, or whatever, that work for us (given what we do and how we make a living):

Brian Solis: audiences > publics = PR people, change the way you think about who you are communicating to.
Jason Falls: promotion > sharing = PR people, change the way you act, treat people with respect for they are partners in a relationship
Tara Hunt: branding > whuffie = Do great things, be a part of your community, listen, and be more an inspiring and person of leadership

We are reflected in how we talk, in how we see things and in how we think they work. All of these people are right, from the perspective they have taken on social media. Yes to Brian, it is about a paradigm shift away from the old, traditional PR/audience relationship to a much different one. Yes to jason, it is about using what you know about relationships to achieve promotion but in a better way. Yes to Tara, it's about the personal and community, which when you see it is really so clearly what branding was always about (but lost sight of).

I find this stuff fascinating, and of course, we have only scratched the surface.

• The design world has many metaphors around users, design, influence and control, and the big one --"use" itself;
• Technologists have many metaphors, reflecting assumptions about problems, solutions, utility, efficiency, and their big one "better."
• Economists and business people have theirs, focused on markets, exchange, demand/supply, production, and their big one: value.
• And so on.

The point here is not to personalize common social metaphors or claims. It's to raise an issue with respect to the social media space in general. Metaphors easily become facts, truths, claims. Ideas taken for granted. They are embedded into arguments, which is to say, opinions. Soon enough we are all using terms like "relationship," "transparency," "community," "conversation," and we don't really know what we mean any longer. At which point it becomes difficult to speak with precision. And misunderstandings then proliferate.

I, for one, don't often know what is meant by "conversation" and I use the term "conversational media" regularly. I don't know what "transparency" means. I definitely do not know what "relationship" means, because I've heard that one used in brand terms that violate my sense of "relationship."

It helps to know who is talking, in order to better understand how the term is being used. But that's not a feasible expectation. And terms, and how we use them, change. When we use a term like "relationship" do we literally mean that Coca Cola has relationships with its customers? I've had thousands to drink and yet felt anything about the brand. I love the taste, love the experience, but the brand? Do we mean "like a relationship?" This will be a topic of another post, as I don't know what "relationship" means, and it bothers me to think that people can really only know relationships with living things, mostly people. So if "relationship" means personal relationships, then we may have a misused and inappropriate metaphor. Perhaps it's time to admit that what we really mean is "communication."

This was what has been on my mind of late. I'm really interested in knowing how social media work, well enough to formalize some of it in a description that works for industry professionals. In studying the field, and coming to know many of its pioneers, I've enjoyed the differences among people much more than the similarities. Each of these people is, wittingly or not, to some degree responsible for new understandings, and for observations, descriptions, and explanations that contribute to the "discipline" (if this is one!).

I probably hail from a place where terminological precision is a more valued facet of communication than communication, and clarity, itself. But I do think we gain substantial insight when we examine our own language, and when we think critically about the terms we use, and how we use them.

Researching social media usage: right research, wrong conclusions?

Just a short post, friends, to rant a bit about a couple social media research posts I've just come across. As invaluable good research is on the uses and implications of social media, I'm sometimes bothered by the conclusions drawn from research. I speak not as a researcher myself, and must express my gratitude to those who get their hands dirty with data collection, organization, and processing. But we all know that research is frequently conducted in order to test a hypothesis — and that consequently, data lends itself to proving the hypothesis to be correct. And there is the fact that some of this research is reported with a flair for the headline, and so the blogs on which we discover internet research may often distort or even falsely report research findings for the sake of a good lead.

I have two complaints. The first deals with conclusions drawn, I think falsely, from research conducted around online communication practices and proximity. The research used Facebook and email habits of users, and concluded that the internet is not a "global village" after all, but that users in fact communicate with people they live close to. Well the research is interesting, but clearly Facebook is not the only way in which people communicate online. And Facebook is a social network for friends. Presumably, if one included the many ways which we communicate with people we don't know: twitter, blog commenting, groups and niche networks, then geographical proximity would not look like the cause of communication. it's not the research so much as the conclusion that bothers me. and not even that the conclusion — we communicate most with people close by — is a bad one (it seems to me an obvious one).

It's the theoretical misstep that bothers me. And it applies to other and similar research efforts. Aggregate user activity, captured in data, are a problematic foundation from which to make claims (such as observations) about user motives and intentions. Even more problematic, in my opinion, is the use of research like this to explain these motives. Either the researcher, or the reporter (bloggers included), will often draw conclusions that are neither supported by data nor expressed by the data. I'm not a scientist or statistician, but it seems clear to me that a finding such as "we use the internet to communicate with people close by" neither refutes the internet's ability to collapse distance; to link disparate and unrelated people, pages, and communication forums; to aggregate commentary around blog posts; to create followings around personalities (twitter) in ways that can subvert mass media's control over image and messaging; nor proves that the global village was a utopian idea, but an idea only.

To make those kinds of claims, one would have to study not just our personal communication habits, but our habits around tweeting, "publishing" and posting, participating in groups, playing social games, subscribing to news, and much more. One would have to know how internet-based discourse networks grow and function. One would have to make cultural claims about access and exposure, oh, and participation, in media events, stories, videos, and other kinds of socialized news.

The village, local or global, is made up of far more than personal conversations. Villages have news, gossip, rumors, and secrets. So it frustrates me when research is used to collapse a concept, when research is used to support conclusions it couldn't possibly contain (because they are outside the data), and when simple stories are created as a means to explain or tell research findings. I'm sure researchers themselves are troubled when this occurs.

The article that prompted this post:

E-mail Traffic Data Casts Doubt on Global-Village Theory
mentioned at Modern Metrix

If you think e-mail is making geographical distance less important, think again. A new analysis indicates that the opposite may be true.
....
Their conclusion is that far from reducing the importance of geographical location, electronic communication appears to have increased it, probably because people swap more messages with those they have personal interaction with.
....
A lot of thinking about economics and numerous business plans are based on the idea that society has become a "small world." There may need to be some hurried rethinking if that premise turns out to be wrong.




And the second part of this rant is sparked by an over-simplified categorization of social media users found at AndersonAnalytics. I am glad that there are others interested in social analytics, and from a behavioral and psychological angle. This has been my bailiwick for a while now. I don't have research to support my "insights" into user psychologies. Anderson floats user types based on a simple form on which users self-describe themselves in ways that unsurprisingly match the characteristics used to differentiate users.

Others have taken this kind of approach, and while I have my doubts about the reliability of self-described behaviors (we don't always know the whys and wherefores of our actions), it's again not the research approach that bothers me. It's the idea that user types may be identified that explain user behavior and experience. This is suggested by the labels: "fun-seeker" (a form question supporting this must be: "Express my creativity", which is an awfully strange way to self-describe "have fun," not to mention that being creative and expressing oneself are different things altogether, that being creative doesn't require an audience, and boring people express themselves, too).

It bothers me when generalizations are made on the basis of data inadequate to the generalizations concluded (our first case, above) or on the basis of data poorly collected (our second case, below). Granted, research in this field is often cited to tell stories that support the cases made by social media professionals. But for those who might take such conclusions as we see here to heart, I want to simply say that online user experiences, and real phenomena of communication, of relationships, of community, etc, are far more complicated than suggested here. If you are in the business of using social media, demand better research and reporting.


From: Anderson Analytics’ Seven Social Network Segments

"To understand the SNS market more broadly, Anderson Analytics has created and profiled seven segments of online Americans. Three SNS Non-User segments and four SNS User segments. The yellow circles mapped below represent the four SNS User segments. The blue circles represent the three SNS Non-User segments."

The Inmates Have Requested Asylum

I spent much of yesterday afternoon listening to podcasts from a conference I wish I had attended: the IA Summit. The podcasts are up on Boxes and Arrows (thank you Chris Baum!) and are well worth a listen. I also found that they looked good in iTunes with the visualizer turned on.

I don't know that I'm an information architect. I was a web developer for seven years but eschewed acronymic attributions on principle and felt that most of us were making it up as we were going along. The design agencies that billed for process and methodology took the designations most seriously, it seemed, and had the design talent that gave them the right to do so. After the dotcom crash many of those methodologies were shelved, as budgets for web work drew the line item for process out of the picture. The industry was commodifying, rates tumbled, and there were few compelling development projects available to small agencies. For a while many of us developers were working like architects being asked only to paint the exterior of a house. The real building contracts were fewer and farther between.

Then the social web began taking shape, and things got interesting again. I removed my entire web portfolio from my site and hunkered down to think about social software. Fascinated as i have always been with social interaction and communication -- in theory and practice -- it seemed to me that new opportunities would emerge for what I started to call "social interaction design" (SxD). I was not so allergic to labels after all -- as long as they were my own. And i pretty much kept to myself, doing startup work and thinking about a conceptual framework for mediated social interactions.

Listening to IA pods yesterday got me thinking about where we now stand. IA, IxD, UX, separately or together is not so important -- the institutional taxonomy and territorial distinctions being beside the point. For I have yet to see an IA drive a social media design or experience. Yet to see an interaction designer lead the team. Yet to see a user experience lead define what a social media application will do or how it will work. From my limited experience in Web 2.0, engineering drives features, marketing drives branding, bizdev drives platform interoperability and open-ness, and web design drives UI, navigation, information architecture. A coffee house, co-working space, or apartment serves as the shop or studio. And process is determined as much by whatever everyone else is doing and launching as it is by internal startup dynamics.

There is no high-level design methodology for social interaction or social media development. IA, IxD, and UX are regarded as a luxury, considered an unnecessary use of funds, and are largely irrelevant and out of the picture. How is it that the very field that should be in front of social media trails it so badly? Why is it that we are still trying to define a tidy set of concepts, for identity, presence, privacy, messaging or what have you, while "web 2.0" startups are out there making this stuff up as they go? Why, failing the means by which to understand social interactions well enough to anticipate them ahead of time, are we cooking up dishes to throw them at the wall in order to see what sticks? Is agile a design process, or another way of saying "we don't know what will happen?" Do we not know what will happen because that's how social media works, or because we don't know how to look at it?

I don't have answers for these questions, but I have suspicions. I do think that design organizes and shapes the user experience. i do think that user experiences, together, produce social practices. I do think those social practices are consistent -- with the designs that facilitate them as well as with the social themes and activities by which we all "know what we're doing" and "what's going on," socially. Something has been built, that something is constrains and enables, and decisions have been made. But our field, the design of social media, is lacking the language and framework by which to conceptually grasp and reasonably anticipate (if not predict) design outcomes. In their absence, it is funders, technologists, marketers (all due respect, but they have their interests and competencies and they are often not user-centric in nature) and visual designers who are making the decisions that shape what a product is, how it (is supposed to) works, by whom it is enjoyed, and what their enjoyment will leave behind. And in the absence of clear thinking and an understanding of mediated social practices, our next best option is to rely on best practices -- which, we know, do not travel well and are frequently lost in translation. (All social media do not need twitter.)

it's nigh on the hour that we begin to furnish the industry, and ourselves, with a solid set of concepts for the "design" of social interactions. They can be obtained and drawn from insightful and principled works in sociology, psychology, linguistics, communication theory, and symbolic interaction. For the inmates have requested asylum. They're not in the asylum. We've misunderstood the very word "asylum." it's not a place that "they" are, but something they want. Design of social media is not containers and spaces, is not identities, mug shots, and IDs. Presence is not roll call and privacy is not just control. People are the content, they're not the contents. I get the sense that in our predilection for design and our visual-mindedness, we have become too comfortable with spatial architectures and confining spaces. That in our emphasis on the user we have forgotten her experience. We treat users as objects, put them in little boxes, and watch them from the panopticon that has been at the center of any post-industrial prison since the idea of control regimes was first thought up.

Design of social media is not a visual problem, as design should not be a method of control. Design should refer to how we think about social media and social interactions -- not something we do in order to design the user's experience. Design should, in this case, be our discipline and conceptual practices. Design should be what we create in order to anticipate individual and social experiences and interactions -- with all of their contingent, dependent, and temporal dynamics intact.

Joshua Porter mentioned, in one of the podcasts, the case of corporate plazas. This oft-cited tale tells of how corporations failed to realize that in their aesthetic self-aggrandizement, they had built plazas and lobbies for themselves that looked good but were barren and bereft of life. William H Whyte, a must-read for anyone doing social, was one of the pioneering researchers to reclaim public spaces for public use and consumption. He proved that we like, and in fact want to be in the midst of, streams of social activity and noise. But he also demonstrated that it was not design, but humans, who negotiate and determine the flow of activity. Subway users in Tokyo, he discovered, could get through a revolving door and to a train in numbers and rates of flow exceeding the theoretical design limits of the door itself.

I worry that unless we catch up quickly, social media will continue down self-reinforcing, and thus increasingly un-imaginitive, cycles of best practices. That we will be left to design corporate plazas. And that we will do so with a taste for the neat and tidy that is our preference as practitioners, but which will only result in lifeless and unsatisfying boxes, and, well, arrows. Imprisoned in the structured containers of thought of our own making. While the inmates, having long left the building, scratch their heads in the yard.


There is so much to learn by thinking outside the box.

Twitter applications and extensions: a list

A list of twitter applications, uses, services and sites. This list is not exhaustive, and I'll try to keep it updated as new services come on line.

I've not had time to annotate the list yet, but i hope to get to that by end of week. I'll be as specific to social interaction design as I can.

Please comment or tweet additions or requests. I won't be ranking anything here -- I could only offer up my own personal favorites. I'm interested in how these apps slice up the twitterverse, create new social practices or utility, measure rank and activity, and so on. For the moment, I'm as interested in that as I am in which are best of breed or which offer the best user experience from a usability perspective, or social practice perspective.

That said, at some point I would like to gather up social interaction design and experience perspectives from you and offer up some "objective" comparisons and identify best practices, along with how they shape use and social behaviors.



aggregators

• PeopleBrowsr
• PRESENCR - one site feeds all
• twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter
• Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networks
• FriendFeed

apps

• 2tweet - Tweet photos and videos by email
• Roomatic
• Twitterchat
• TinyChat - Disposable Chatrooms for the Twitter Generation - ReadWriteWeb
• Mitter - Share Your Video Experience.
• TwitPic / Share photos on Twitter
• Yammer : Home
• Twuffer - Schedule Twitter tweets.
• TweetChat

articles

• YvoSchaap.com - TwitterThoughts
• Information Retrieval on the Live Web > by Paul Ogilvie
• Twitter Search Results on Google for Greasemonkey

clients

• PeopleBrowsr
• twhirl | the social software client
• Welcome to Seesmic

deceased?

• john_erik > Tweeterboard : Conversation Analytics for Twitter
• brabblr.com
• flippedup/twitter
• Twubble
• tweetpeek

directories

• Just Tweet It » THE Directory for Twitter Users
• twibs : Twitter Business Directory - 6,703 businesses and counting!
• Twitter Friend Recommendations | Who Should i Follow?
• Twitter Directory Link Up - Find, Follow & be Followed by the People that Count!
• Welcome :: TweeterTags.com - What are you all about? - Find similar people on Twitter
• Twellow :: Profile Editor
• monitter : real time, live twitter monitor | free live twitter embed widget
• Tracking Twitter
• Twitter ?(Social Brand Index)?

extending twitter

• ykyat
• twaction - turning tweets into actions
• TwitterSoap
• TwitterCritic - Film reviews by Twitter users
• TwitterKeys
• FlixPulse: Twitter Tool For Movie Reviews | B.E.T.A. Daily
• Twitter / BeatMyTweet
• Tweetree - gravity7's Stream
• twtvite :: SF Happy Hour Tweetup
• SecretTweet.com - Post your secrets anonymously to Twitter
• Twitlonger - When you talk too much for Twitter
• Get Satisfaction - People-Powered Customer Service

links & urls

• TwitterBuzz - The most popular links on Twitter - URL Popularity

networking, people search

• Tweepler (Tweepler.com)
• Mr. Tweet -> Your Personal Networking Assistant!
• Buzzable
• TwitterFriends - Your relevant network on Twitter
• DoesFollow - doesfollow.com - Find out who follows whom on Twitter
• Twitseeker
• TwitterFriends - Your relevant network on Twitter

polls, social search

• Questions and Answers via Twitter - LazyTweet
• StrawPoll—Tiny polls in 140 characters or less
• Ask500 - Public Opinion Polls for the World
• twtpoll :: a simple survey/poll twitter app.
• Aardvark
• Mosio - People Powered Mobile Search - SMS Search, Mobile Q&A, Text Message Questions, Answers, People, Questionarium, Phone Search, Mobile Social Network, Widgets, WAP, PDA, Mobile Collaboration, Wiki, Enterprise, Mobility, Synchronization, Workforce, Social Mobility
• Twidentify Twitter Search
• ToAnswer » Using Twitter to find answers to your burning questions
• HelpWith: A TweetApp
• PollDaddy Twitter Polls - Send a poll directly to your Twitter stream!
• plusplusbot
• Twitter Answers.
• twittpoll.com - twit your opinion

search & filters

• Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about?
• Twitter Spy
• serendipiTwitterous
• monitter : real time, live twitter monitor | free live twitter embed widget
• Twitterfall
• Public timeline - MicroPlaza
• Public timeline - MicroPlaza
• Twitter Venn
• What twitter people are saying near you :: Twits Near Me
• Twithority Search

trends & tracking

• TwitterCounter: How popular is @nickmarks
• Real time Twitter User and Client Stats - Tweetrush Powered by Rush Hour Analytics
• Tracking Twitter Links: Twitter Analytics Tools & More | Get Elastic
• t|w|i|t|t|e|r|m|e|t|e|r
• Tweetrush
• Twist - see trends in twitter
• Tracking Twitter

twitter app roundups

• SXSW: The Figures Behind The Top Web Apps - ReadWriteWeb
• 14 Twitter directories to find new friends | Webware - CNET
• 5 Interesting Uses of Twitter
• The Top 21 Twitter Applications (According to Compete)
• twibs : find the businesses on twitter - 4,814 businesses and counting!
• BIGLIST of Twitter Tools and Third Party Apps | Online Marketing Blog
• Library clips :: roundup
• http://twitter.pbwiki.com/
• New Data on Top Twitter Applications and Usage
• tweeternet - What is Twitter?
• 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe | FlowingData
• Useful Twitter Applications

stats & ranking

• Twitter Quotient for 'gravity7' | web.forret.com
• Twinfluence - Twitter Influence Analyzer
• TwitterHawk - Introducing you to people like you, near you!
• TweetEffect- When did you lose or gain twitter followers?
• Twitalyzer Clout Details for @gravity7
• TunkRank :: gravity7
• Twit or Fit Top 10
• http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/engine.asp?u=gravity7&lang=&uri=
• TwitterCounter Stats: The Ultimate Twitter Statistics Provider!
• Klout
• Twitemperature: How hot are you?
• Twithority Search
• Twitterless :: Get Updates When Someone Stops Following You on Twitter
• Twitter StreamGraphs
• Twitter Charts
• TweetVolume : Home
• Twitter Stats
• TwitterFriends statistics for gravity7

tagging

• #hashtags - Popular
• Twitter Fan Wiki / TagChannels
• Twitter Teams :: Main

url shorteners & tracking

• Twitturly - Real-time Link Tracking on Twitter
• BackTweets
• POPrl.com / Shrinking popular URLs since 1973 / What's POPular
• bit.ly, a simple url shortener

visualizations

• Twitter Venn
• YvoSchaap.com - TwitterThoughts
• Twitter Spy
• TwittEarth :: Live Twitts all over the world
• twittervision
• twistori

The Gift, and the Spirit of the Word

"In the economic and legal systems that have preceded our own, one hardly ever finds a simple exchange of goods, wealth, and products in transactions concluded by individuals. First, it is not individuals but collectivities that impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each other." Marcel Mauss, The Gift

The girl is married to the boy. He receives a gift from the girl's parents. It belongs to him now and to his family. The families, by means of the gift, are bound, as are the girl and the boy. His family, by means of the gift, is bound by the obligation of reciprocity to hers. The gift, given to him, establishes a line of credit back to her family.

The gift anchors the line that will bind the two families, opening a conduit for exchange of foodstuffs, tools, and mutual help. The gift symbolizes a relationship of gift and debt, and of mutual obligations. It is the act through which the tribal economy maintains relationships on the basis of debts and obligations.

The gift belongs to what was called by French anthropologist Marcel Mauss a system of "total economic exchange." It is a system in which all relationships, between men and women, between families, and among objects, belong to one single social system. it is an economy in which exchanges belong to relationships. Ceremonies and rituals of the gift serve to maintain those relationships, and to guarantee their perpetuation.

These archaic societies were bound by tradition. They looked back, not ahead. Past rites and rituals were honored and reenacted in order to preserve social order and cultural identity. And, most importantly, to determine the tribe's relationships and social order. Objects and things were, their utility aside, a means of reproducing relationships. They were truly social objects.

In the tribal gift exchange, it is not the gift that is given but the relationship that is maintained. Giving the gift creates debt, and a debt creates obligation:

"The taonga and all goods termed strictly personal possess a hau, a spiritual power. You give me one of them, and I pass it on to a third party; he gives another to me in turn, because he is impelled to do so by the hau my present possesses. I, for my part, am obliged to give you that thing because I must return to you what is in reality the effect of the hau of your taonga." Marcel Mauss, The Gift



Of course that was then, and this is now. We don't have a gift economy. We have an exchange economy. Capital mediates our exchanges: things have a price, the price is paid with money, and the transaction creates no obligations among those participating. Relationships are not bound by economic exchange, but exist separately, to be maintained or negotiated around opportunities and commitments.

Our culture looks ahead, not back. It chooses to forego tradition for the opportunity and possibility of tomorrow. It is not closed, but open. It uses contracts, agreements, markets, and less formal commitments and norms to negotiate relationships.

And in the age of communication, in which mediated interactions supply enormous opportunities and possibilities for transactions and exchanges, but for relationships, too, conversation itself is becoming the new symbolic form of exchange. Our markets operate today not just on goods and their exchange, not just on discrete transactions, but on open-ended talk, conversation, and interaction.

Talk becomes our means of connecting: to the possibilities of relationships, and to opportunities for exchange. Talk that is not a closed off ritual of ceremonial traditions, but talk that sustains the radical open-ness and very future of our forward-leaning society.

In social media, our talk, too, involves gifts, exchanges, and relationships. But our gifts are an offer, not a debt. And an offer can be accepted, refused, or held open. We use gestures, statements, messages, and symbolic tokens -- all elements of the medium. All media artifacts. Artifacts that capture our individual claims but which can be distributed and disseminated, recognized and acknowledged, and picked up by others.

Our conversations are rich, open, and forever new and renewing. They look ahead, not behind. They contain our appeals, to one another, to peers, friends, to communities, and yes, to the public. They can be found, searched, indexed. And of course, they connect and can be connected. And through them we connect to conversations, to things said and offered; and to each other, for a moment, for a short while, or for a long time.

Our talk is our medium of exchange. it is personal and self-expression, but it is in front of people we know and people we could know. It is an appeal, contingent as all events are in our age, on their acceptance by some other, free, and interested individual.

We talk among friends, and our talk is often friendly. Friendship is the nature of our relationships -- not tribes, cults, guilds, or factions. Not ruling classes, secret societies, or even institutional elites. Friendship is our offer and friendliness our offering. It is open, and it looks ahead. Our conversations are friendly, and we are for the most part kind to one another. And in kindness we find our mutual interest; in reciprocity, our generosity and our commitment to the open, and to the future.

And in social media we organize these relationships of friendship. We find ways to sediment them into a soft social commitment, a face to wear, a software to to socialize relationships and markets around friendship. We are drawn to the ways that best suit us, the audiences that reflect us, and the communities that embrace us. It is our way, our way forward, paths intersecting and traced ephemerally along lines of trust and arcs of friendship.

The gift is open, the gift is everywhere. The gift is our talk, our interest, and our interface. It is what connects when we respond, when our response is an offer, an offer to talk. The gift and its spirit return, and are in our world.

The gift is all. The gift is trust. Our future is open. We must speak and be friends. It is the world. And we must give our world our word.


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Who's motivating your users?

Alfred Hitchcock used to say that he never made a "Whodunnit" movie. His movies were "For whom was it done?" In fact a lot of his movies begin with the crime. In some, the victim of the crime turns out to be the criminal himself.

In all of Hitchcock's films, we the audience witness some aspect of the crime. And because Hitchcock was a master of camerawork, and used his camera to let the audience in as a witness, we're usually in on something that one or more characters don't know. Jimmy Stewart's neighbor leaving his apartment in Rear Window, as Jimmy reaches for something he has dropped. The killer's shadow on the shower curtain in Psycho. A vertiginous zoom in on Kim Novack's curled hair -- an audience reveal that winds up the plot's second, and formal spiral in the mystery Vertigo.

Hitchcock's films were as riveting as they were not only for his splendid choices in casting his lead actress, but for his singular talent at subordinating characters to formal puzzles and logics. He is credited as being the first to involve the audience in solving, or "creating," the film. He was notorious, too, for glossing over his actors' needs and for attending instead to the visual narration of the particular puzzle at hand. It mattered more to him the direction in which his actors were looking than capturing their motivation.

Hitchcock knew that a mystery thriller could become endlessly suspenseful if actions were not simply as they appeared, but were instead motivated by another, for another, or on behalf of another. This allowed him to continuously shift the "guilt" and "suspicion" from character to character. We in the audience had the job of figuring out who was who, and who was who to whom.

The solution to the puzzle, and to the crime, always came out when relationships among the characters could be resolved.

Action is more interesting when it is a matter of interpersonal motive and relationship, rather than the accomplishment of the task itself completed by the action. It's a pity there are few good imitators of Hitchcock. (Although there are some; and social films like Crash, Amor es Perros, Red, White, Blue, Babel, and others in which relationships form out of coincidence and chance in a way capture the state of social fragmentation endemic to contemporary society.)

We in social media can learn from Hitchcock. We can learn to ask not "What did the user do" but "For whom was it done." Was it done for his/her own self-image and repute? Was it done for the attention of another? To solicit reciprocal interest of another? To gain notice by a group, club, or circle of peers? To obtain status in front of an audience, or to receive the validation of peers?

I wonder what kinds of social media Hitchcock would design, if he were in our industry. How might he use his "camera" to show the audience something that was off screen to the actors involved in a situation or social interaction. What kinds of relationships he might put people in if he were designing social games. And how he might reveal clues and thread his plot points. Whether the audience might be involved in passing that thread through the warp and woof of a networked social fabric. And how interesting and engaging some of his creations would be, designed not around Who said something but For whom was it said?


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Contingencies in Social Media

There's a concept we don't use nearly enough in social media, even though it describes what is possibly the single-most important phenomenon of online interaction: contingency. It means, roughly, that one thing is contingent on another. One act is contingent on another. Contingencies are critical because they separate the possible from the probable. All systems are subject to contingencies.

In social media, the most prominent contingency is the response. Communication goes nowhere unless it is picked up, or taken up, either as talk or in some other form of online social interaction. Blogs are linked to, favorited, bookmarked, or commented on. Tweets are replied to, re-tweeted, or solicit a direct message response. Twitterer's follow, and are followed. Videos are uploaded and then viewed, favorited, added to playlists, commented on, or responded to with a video response.

The value of any user's action in any kind of social media is always contingent on the act of another user. In some cases just a view is enough, and is still counted by many social media systems.

Contingency is not just specific to social media. Markets have contingencies. Our current credit markets are frozen because of their contingencies: is the counter-party solvent; will the trading partner still be around; are securities worth their rating?

When contingencies go unresolved, either by interacting partners or by the system itself, ambiguities threaten to overwhelm the system and erode its utility and functionality. In twitter, a rise in spammers and dishonest/strategic users increases the ambiguity surrounding Who the user is, and What his/her intentions are. This translates into a certain kind of ambiguity: the identity of the user. Which creates systemic uncertainty, and infuses interaction with risk. (There are two kinds of nteraction on twitter: talking and following, so each one is vulnerable. Do I follow; Do I respond?)

Systems, unlike structures, aren't stable. They're dynamic, and they rely on continuous participation/interaction to reproduce themselves. They can endure only as long as they can manage (and their users manage) the contingencies they permit and produce. When the users or participants in a system have to handle these contingencies themselves -- when the system fails because its own system constraints are failing -- the burden of contingency can kill off the system. Users are required to handle the contingency presented with each transaction individually, where when the system is operating well, those contingencies are handled by the system.

This is the loss of trust problem. The trust that is lost in other users (trading partners, twitterers) corresponds to a loss of trust in the system. Architects of social systems that place a high level of trust in their users need to think carefully about how their system responds to abuse and trust violations. If it cannot correct these at a system level, its own survival becomes a matter of contingency.

The system becomes contingent on the trust invested in it by its users. When this trust begins to erode, system's operation is threatened.

Contingency is doubly contingent in systems. And it is circular (reciprocal).

Current financial markets are all abuzz with talk about loss of confidence and trust -- when systems are growing, their benefits are distributed to participants, who are motivated to keep it going. But when they lose trust in the system, their loss of confidence freezes up the system and a crashing system behaves very differently from a growing system.

it seems that we need to better understand these contingencies. We are heavily invested in open, free, and voluntary interaction systems, and whether for trading, exchange, messaging or other purposes, system architects need to recognize that social system performance will always be constrained by two types of contingency: user-to-user contingencies; and user-to-system contingencies.

Now would be a good time to consider the social interaction controls available to twitter users for improved handling of consequences of system-level failure (problems relating to twitter's architecture, functions, and UX). If twitter is unable to constrain abuses, its users must be able to better regulate and manage their experience. System transformation, if not crash, is otherwise unavoidable.

Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Social media's first law: user centric design

The first law of social interaction design is the law of user centric design. The user centricity of social media is obvious. Social media are voluntary, and they mean to their users what their users put in and take out of them. Users are interested users, not needy or obliged users. Even users who can claim to have goals and objectives are motivated to participate, contribute, even just read and lurk, because they want to. Compelling social media do not compel users -- users become compelled, for whatever short or long-term interest it is that compels them.

That said, we recognize that social media are highly psychological. The reasons that motivate any given user may be rational, or not, may be task or goal-oriented, or may be a reflection of distraction, compulsion, or even "addiction." The fact that social media use involves psychological interests has a couple implications for designers, builders, and users. First, it means that we cannot know the reasons for a user's use, or by extension, the reasons that an application is used. Second, we cannot even assume that a user knows those reasons. I like to say that to know what a social media application does, turn it off. We will soon know why and how we use an application by what we miss.

This leads us to a corollary of the first law: the value of social media is specific to the user. Ask any user why he or she uses it and you will get an answer specific to that individual. Reasons for use are not generic, and are not generalizable. The social media application is individuated by its users -- that is, it accrues uses and reasons for use as it accrues users. Furthermore, ask any user what he or she uses it for, and you will get uses specific to that user. The value of social media is a combination of how a user uses it, and what reasons s/he can provide for using it. Value is in the eyes of the beholder. It is subjective, individual, and non-generalizable. We cannot ascribe one value to a social media application, and should approach any claims about an application's value with caution. (They are likely to reflect the value perceived by that person, given the context and interests of his or her use of it.)

A second corollary obtains from the first law: users use social media based on existing and past experiences with other media. Users do not invent uses for social media wholesale, but rather use new applications to extend their current habits and uses of other media. A user who chats will likely use Twitter differently from a user who blogs. A user who uses IM will likely use Twitter differently than a user who is a Facebook addict. And so on. Research is not required to prove the claim that we blog, update, comment, post, upload, review, rate, recommend, IM, chat, email, and tweet very differently. I'm not likely to suddenly start commenting in all caps on Youtube tomorrow, any more than a heavy chatter is to suddenly switch to Twitter for conversation. Each of us is a bundle of habits and repetitions. And we use social media according to how we can each see them fitting into what we tend to do.

A third corollary follows, and it is that we cannot know what the user is doing and experiencing. The web as biased in favor of the affirmative, meaning, it captures action but not inaction. Clicks are recorded, but not reading. We know only when a user does something, and that something is captured as an affirmation. There are no "contradictory" or "negative" acts counted online. An act of opposition would look the same to the web server as a an act of affirmation. All actions are, in communication theory terms, a "yes." The inability to know what user's experience confounds all media, but it is complicated online by the fact that we can track and measure some things. And we focus mightily on them. In the case of Twitter and in the culture of status updating, however, we have no means by which to know what and how much is being read. It takes a retweet, a comment, or a reply to publicize and manifest the reader's attention to a message. This is, of course, why we count our followers. Their number is a substitute for attention and visibility, meaning relevance and acknowledgment. Each and every tweet solicits a response, and in its loneliness is one of the small moments of irrelevance we suffer through daily in our contract with social media. There is no way of showing others that we are paying attention without making it obvious -- by saying so.

A fourth corollary follows, and we have suggested it already: to show that s/he is paying attention, the user must act. Communication is not just the performance of a statement; that would just be expression. Communication occurs when that statement is accepted or rejected. This "yes or no" response is what transforms expression into communication, what makes of it an action system. Designers know of actions. But in communication, the action is on either the message or its author. It is this possibility, that we can respond to what is said or to who said it, that implicates relationships in social media. And the ambiguity of which was intended that can often subsist in social media use fuels the engine for further participation.


Social media professionals can do no better than to keep the first law in mind. And to bear in mind, also, that users are different. For designers, this should mean occasionally forgoing standards or conventions for something else. Tools designed for writing and publishing online, for example, need not be the basis for fast messaging and lifestreaming. Page layouts common to text-oriented applications will miss out on users who watch and see (some desktop Twitter apps now emphasize visualizing the stream of users over and instead of their posts). For marketers, it is unlikely that top influencers are the ones to reach on Twitter -- other kinds of users are more motivated to retweet and promote. And for inventors, solving some of the big problems, such as awareness and attention, or addressing use cases that involve under-served user types, can offer compelling opportunities.

The law of user centricity tells us that we cannot know what we might do, nor can we know what can be done. But that in all cases we should ask, what is it capable of? We will address this in the second law.


Social media's second law: it's a verb, not a noun

Social media's third law: designing for communication



Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Paradoxes of social media: Twitter, Facebook, and status culture

All social media work only because we use them. And thus it's a given that the social technologies that attract and get the most use tell us something about what works: from a technical standpoint as well as from a cultural standpoint. The "status culture" that now exists around use of twitter, facebook's status updates, and a myriad of related tools for talk clearly shows us where the action is. And in social media, it's all about activity. Activity now occurs not only through the use of these tools, but in tracking, monitoring, measuring, and otherwise attending to the activity served by these tools.

Those of us in the business of social media, because we are ourselves users, share an interest not only in using the tools but in knowing what makes them useful. It's our profession to know more than our own experience of the tools, and to understand how others use them, what for, and why. If we are forward-looking, we want to be able to speak intelligently about how these tools can be improved, about how they can be co-opted, assimilated to other uses, extended, and of course what might come next. But the very fact that each of us is a user can easily distort our understanding, insofar as what we get out of a tool is only one user's perspective. We would like to be able to talk about social media objectively. But there is a difficulty in that: we lack an established framework, and good research is hard to come by.

Conventional software design has a framework. It is based on the utility of software and its use. Use of non-social software has value to the user that can be grasped as "use value." Users use software for the value of its uses: hence the value of utility. Software that does stuff. And what simplifies the design frameworks (user interface design, interaction design, user experience design) is that utility can be framed with a reasonable degree of objectivity. Success and failure of software can then be designed for, and evaluated, on the basis of the software's ability to meet expectations of user needs and objectives. In short, use and utility go hand in hand: use validates uitility, utiliity is the primary reason for use.

But in social media, the social interaction designer's challenge is a different one. Each of us has uses for social media, and they vary greatly. They may vary in terms of habits of use, expectations of use, distracted uses, strategic uses, and so on. Each of us has our own subjective experience of social media -- and taken together they do not produce an objective description, but rather a myriad of unique perspectives. Objectivity and objective descriptions of software in the social media domain simply don't exist, for the reason that they are tools used for subjective reasons, satisfying individual interests, and according to each user's personal and interpersonal competencies. Social utility, if there were such a thing, would offer a false promise, were we to set it as a design and experience goal. Use of social software is not utilitarian. We have to accept that in social media, use is not measured in terms of utility. What then, is it? And how do we, as professionals, estimate even the most simple questions addressed to social media: what is it, what is it used for, who uses it, and why? For if we can't answer these questions, we would have to admit to ourselves that there are no design principles for social media, that in all likelihood its evolution is uncontrollable and chaotic, that successes are impossible to predict, and that users simply do what they want with them in ways that are impossible to anticipate or predict. Not a good basis for design and engineering professionals -- let alone the markets hungry to uncork the power of social media!

We can take on the first question, What is it? by dismissing the question outright. Yes, social media are technologies, are tools, are applications, sites, and so on -- they exist materially in the real world, and have features that function and structure experience. But they are not objective events -- the social interactions and personal uses that animate them subjectivize them.
Social media are not objective media, but subjective media. Used by subjects to interact with other subjects, they are best thought of as verbs, not as nouns. So the question is moot: "What is it" is a noun phrase -- a misaligned and misguided question in matters of social activity.

Better would be to ask What do people do with it? That focuses the question on activities and uses. Social media involve users in socio-technical practices, that is, doings that are possible only by means of a technology. They are not doing what the technology does, but are using the technology for what they want to do. Hence the awkward but more accurate term "socio-technical" practices. If we rephrase the question Who uses it? we are even better aligned. For we are now focused on the user of the technology.

User centricity founds the social interaction designer's perspective, as it does the conventional software design. But in social media design, we know that nothing happens without a community of users. So we extend user centricity to the social, and to the social practices that emerge when many users use a social media application. Now we're getting to the heart of the matter. For good social media require that many different users, each an individual with unique interests and expectations, social competencies, "share" some common experience that is rewarding enough that they continue to do so. Nobody forces us to use social media -- each and every user is an interested user.

But is every user interested in the technology? Not really. And this raises a common misunderstanding among those who fund, develop, and run social media. Users by definition use a tool for their own reasons. And these may vary greatly from the reasons the funders and builders created the technology. In answer to the question Who owns social media, it's clearly the users who own it. They may not own the application, but they own their experience.

We now face a bit of a conundrum. If the technology is a real and functioning "thing," but its functionality and use lies in subjective experiences, where does a social interaction designer even begin to formalize the design constraints and feature specs of social media? If architecture is not materials, mass, volume, and space but is people coming and going, what's the design language? What does it talk about, and what can it say?

Social interaction design needs to take one more step away from the technology, away from hard definitions and into the soft of software. The "you" and "I" need to be restored to UI. More, even, for the user interface, really, is better thought of as a social interface.

Which brings us back finally to where we started. This time, however, more properly attuned to the matters at hand. Status culture, or the set of practices that have emerged around social media designed for short-form messaging, micro-blogging, and feeds of personal news and activities, involves new forms of talk. As new forms of talk, the uses of twitter and other feed-based applications engender new ways of communication, new formats of communication, and new experiences of communication. In social terms, talk and communication serve purposes of activity, of reaching understanding, of coordinating actions, of maintaining relationships.

These social media represent new personal experiences of new ways of being social. The tools enable users to contribute and participate for their own reasons -- and produce, at the other end, a record of user-created content. Individual uses and habits, and experiences, are de-coupled from the byproduct, which can again be used by others (searched, quoted, linked to, embedded, and so on). This de-coupling of the act from the product, of the talking from content, and of social "performance" from the social artifacts left behind, defines the tools' essential functionality.

But how, if the use of social media involves a fundamental de-coupling and dis-embedding of talk and communication from the product and content of talk and communication, is this a design-able experience? How, if tools limit and constrain the experiences they enable, do we accommodate the fact that the uses of the tool are limited also by social practices? Can social interactions be engineered? Can talk be structured? How would a social interaction designer go about "improving" the user experience?

To demonstrate just how strange this problem can be for the social media designer, let's take Twitter as an example. The tool was conceived of as a means of passing sms messages to the web. it has become something completely different (though it retains its 140 character limit -- a hard technical constraint that has become an arbitrary stylistic necessity of writing on twitter). Twitter features a couple of unusual, and strictly defined, design "flaws." But these flaws are essential to its appeal. First, the river of tweets each of us sees includes our own tweets among those of -- not those we're tweeting to -- but those we're listening to. Thus each of use sees an illusion: there is no conversation occurring between us and those whose tweets we see. The users who are listening to us are not the ones we see around our own tweets. A more accurate view would require two panels -- one, our own tweets and those following us; the other, those we're following.

This design sleight of hand creates a false impression and illusion -- of being listened to, or of being in conversation with, the wrong audience. it works on facebook, because status updates are pulled from the same audience we update to. There is only one audience on Facebook: your friends. But on twitter there are two. And this is the second design "flaw" that engendered rapid adoption. One could appear to be popular, by follower count, simply by following people. The unilateral and asymmetrical relationships that define twitter's audience aggregation method, like its river presentation, creates an illusion of visibility and relevance. An entire industry exists to measure not the content of what twitter users say, but the envelope of their activity and the impression of their social relevance.

My point is not to denigrate twitter or twitter culture, but to illustrate that in social media, dysfunctional design can be socially functional. If the individual user can make sense of the application's design, and if these experiences scale, social practices can take hold that can make a social media tool successful (from that perspective -- to say nothing of business models).

Twitter offers up further examples for social media designers. Twitter's simplicity and lack of structure stands out. For a tool as stripped-down as it is, a remarkable amount of culture has grown out of Twitter. This, even, in spite of the fact that so many people continue to say "I don't get it." There are applications out there that people don't like, or that they think are a waste of time. But there are few about which so many have claimed that they don't see the point. This may or may not suggest a serious challenge for twitter in the months ahead — if it turns out that many users are simply trying out what they've heard everyone talking about; and if this combination of novelty and churn results in social noise and spammy misuses. Nevertheless, there is a lesson for social interaction design in Twitter's simplicity: the fewer the design constraints, the more uses and users.

Restraint in design itself, reflected in a tendency to "under design" the interface, the user experience, and interactions, opens up and sustains a greater number of possible uses. Furthermore, the less designed a social media application is, the more types of users will find uses for it. This is an architectural lesson. For while architecture delimits and constrains human experience in order to enable and facilitate some (desired, intended) experiences, it by the same token excludes and eliminates others. Twitter's open approach to interface, experience and interaction design shifts the burden of framing the experience from application design to social practice. Where architecture is open, social practices absorb and form the constraints on experience and interaction. Social experiences need "framing" to achieve the consistency required if they are to be sustained. Twitter shows us that social practices will fill in when design does not.

If this constitutes a principle of social interaction design, it has a serious consequence. The more open and un-structured the design, the more open and flexible the user experiences and uses. We have mentioned that social media work by framing experience and engendering social practices. But the wider the range of individual experiences on the way in, the greater the chance of noise and rubbish on the way out. The user motive for Twitter may be described as "Whenever I feel like it." If that describes when the user uses Twitter, the benefit gained by a tool that can be used anytime, anywhere, for whatever reason is mitigated by the challenge in getting more out of the aggregation of uses. Content produced on a "whenever, whatever" application may tend towards the lowest common denominator, and may want for the connectivity, continuity, and sustained threads that characterize higher quality conversation. Furthermore, the asymmetry that exists between creating and consuming in all social media is never higher than when a user can use the tool for whatever reason, whenever s/he wants. Tighter and more structured tools may limit their own appeal, but gain from a sense of common purpose and commonality of experience.

There is much more to cover yet, but we'll take a break before this post becomes so long that it kills its own audience. In the next installment we will take a look at forms of talk, and lay out some basic laws of talk-oriented social media. These will include user centricity, social practices, communication, and mediation. And we will raise some design challenges created by the implication that for social media, social practices bear the burden of framing the experience.


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Status culture: facebook, twitter, and what they mean

In a series of posts over on JohnnyHolland.org I recently made an attempt at teasing out social interaction design issues specific to lifestreaming. Lifestreaming was last year, and the year before, the sort of rich media, flow-based newcomer to interaction models. Lifestreaming looks like serial blogging, tweeted perhaps instead of blogged, and including pictures, videos, and other rich media (seesmic?). But like all information streams and flow apps, its navigation is limited. The more I thought about it, the more complicated matters became.

The reason was simple, and wasn't really a matter of design at all. It was more a recognition that we are increasingly in the business of applying design to speech, architecture to talk, navigation not only across conversations but plumbing the depths and past of conversation and speech also.

Twitter is the culprit of the 140 character limit, but the social networks (Yahoo 360, Friendster, then of course Facebook) get much of the blame for the status update. Facebook had always been more utilitarian than its chatty and teeny kin. A swiss army knife to the crazy straws and party cups more representative of etiquette on MySpace, Tribe, Friendster, and Orkut, Facebook wisely saw that individual user activity could be made social after the fact if it were printed to a running news and activity roll.

With this, users could look active without having to make the awkward declaration of what they were doing on Facebook, all the time. Users could be seen by others without having to draw attention to themselves. Most importantly, users could seem to be talking even when they weren't.

I find this fascinating. If there's one nugget of social interaction that really needs to be mined and understood — for the purposes of design improvements and next generation social media — this is it for me. Not only the practice of posting status updates (and their variations), but also their supporting practices: following, reading, retweeting, commenting, and so on.

Understanding what "status culture" means seems to me central not only to grasping how our talk tools and services are changing — but also how our communication is changing.

For the next several days I hope to post on "status culture." I will take a different angle on it with each post. The facets I have chosen include:

• the culture of writing wide, of posting the self, of self-talk in front of others, and of saying little to nobody in particular
• the design challenge of the user who uses it "whenever I feel like it," of the challenges of designing social interactions for de-coupled structures and unilateralism and asymmetry in speaking and using
• interpretations of status updating and tweeting from the linguistic and communication theoretical perspectives, including the art of speaking in the third person, of speaking to be seen, of speaking to be found, and of speaking another's words
• the meaning of status updates and short messaging to different kinds of users, using my social media personality types as a starting point
• the sociology and anthropology of status updating, including of course influence, social capital, and society as side effect and special effect
• the psychology of updates, and of the peculiar reversals, projections, passive aggressions and mistaken meanings common to living as sentenced, by sentencing, and by face
  

This might all seem like overkill, a reading of the 140 character phenomenon that's too close, too analytical, too "too" to be worth the effort. But that would be to take the undertaking too literally. I think it would be fair to say that of all the social practices to emerge since the profile and the social network/graph, this not-so-little ritual has crossed the tipping point and as such indicates what is to come. Social media is leaving the page, conversation is changing, and communication is possibly becoming a symbolic culture in its own right.

Which would be to suggest that communication is no longer just for communicating, that is, reaching understanding with somebody else about something said. For if communication, in the form of short messaging in front of discontinuous audiences, is a new form of symbolic interaction, it is no longer just about the claims raised and resolved by interlocutors (speaking subjects). It is also a means of presencing the self, of self-presentation, of being visible and localizable, of expression but also projection, indication, reference, social inclusion, and much more. In short, a mode of production, not just of the self or subject, but of culture.

And in that, of course, it necessarily attracts commercial interests. Whose attempts to converse, and to be found in conversation, will likely both threaten and extend the possibilities of the form, and the viability of tools and services designed to support it.

I hope you will join me in this project.

Note; This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Social Media PR Playbook: Thoughts

I've been gestating ideas for the past several days around ways to use social media for PR purposes that would exceed the normal use of social media tools to print and distribute PR messaging. It strikes me that PR agencies are well positioned to understand client needs and interests, brand and message, and also how best to craft and roll out story lines. That's a skill, and a valuable one, for the combination of care attendant to a client's image and reputation, and the means by which to caretake it, are not intrinsic to consumer audiences. But the agency's self interest in demonstrating success can result in demands on social media (such as the ongoing debate around ROI and how best to calculate it) that may hamper creativity and low-level risk taking.

To wit, a PR firm may tend to view social media as outreach tools, means of distributing a campaign across yet another medium. A PR firm may wish to translate traditional messaging to social media, and monitor results for signs up pick up. It may wish to influence influencers, as it does in its offline campaigns, and again count the results. To which end tools like Radian6 and Visible Technologies can be used to validate success.

These are the things we do when we're uncertain of the value of both our effort and of our methods. Which has me wondering aloud about crafting a "playbook" for social media marketing strategies. If we could take some confidence from our methods, perhaps we might ask less of the metrics and measurement we use to confirm results.

A playbook, not unlike the highly-guarded clipboard many coaches hold tight to their chests on the sidelines, would articulate options best suited for specified needs. Perhaps some for "offense" and some for "defense" (ok, and special teams). Plays for image branding, for event announcements and invitations, for appeals to area or domain experts, critics, and reviewers, plays for building up a campaign launch, and plays for carrying it through. And so on. These plays would, in theory at least, provide a measure of confidence (rather than a measure of results) and could help the PR firm in client pitches as well as in facilitating creative approaches to social media engagement.

The playbook I've been mulling over would of course start with a definition of goals and objectives, many of them, and define appropriate means of execution. Branding, visibility, news, crisis remedies, customer support, resident expertise and help desk operations, product tips, lifestyle branding, and much more might each be pursued according to different strategies and tactics. Street, buzz, and affinity marketing. Sales, incentives, and offers. Best of breed reviews and recommendations. Long tail associations and links. End user reviews, expert reviews.

Or more creatively, putting product in the hands of a good cause and lifestreaming results. Creating transparency between product and consumers through product co-creation and "crowd sourced" feature requests and changes. Sneak peaks at future product, service, or other kinds of release (tv shows, movies, music included!). Back stage passes and special invitations to participate or engage with insiders. Twitter-based narratives and story lines (I like Family Guy -- I'd follow Stewie on twitter if his posts were written in character and revealed upcoming plot elements. I like Charlie Rose -- I'd follow his posts, or his producer's, or even those of his interviewees....)

If the goals of a social media release or campaign are the same as those of any commercial use of media -- distribution -- then why not give audiences something to tweet about. Why just package the same old and then count "micro-blogging" mentions? (Because it's safe? Because we know how to do it? Because we're lazy?) There's an opportunity here for creative revitalization of social media marketing for those who can see that this is a new, direct, immediate, and multi-media channel of communication. Used for talking and sharing. Not just for repetition but for invention.

Old media maintain a separation between the brand and its audience. And all PR, marketing, and advertising seek to cross that gap by appealing to audiences' attention and interest. Well, social media break that "fourth wall" (theater metaphor, the fourth wall is what separates what's on stage from the audience, and sustains the "suspended disbelief" required to keep the audience believing what its seeing while unaware of its production.) Break the fourth wall, expose or provide access to means of production, and I'm certain bountiful mentions and audience interest will follow naturally. All brands have willing fans, all have great stories customer stories posted by the wall alongside the water-cooler. All have internal brand champions whose ideas for getting product to non-profits, causes, and other beneficiaries would make for great PR and audience re-tale-ing... Brands and their agencies of record should be engaging in new and note-worthy efforts, not just repeating brand-centric messages.

I'm working on the playbook. Truly, I think that if commercial interests want audiences (read: users) to follow social media campaigns, they have to give us something worth talking about.

TheHornGroup panel on PR and social media: an email

This an email exchange between myself and Edelman Sr VP Christel van der Boom on last night's panel at the Horn Group. We thought it would be worth sharing. I've simply copied the final email into blogger, placing Christel in web-ready tangerine.


Hey,
You seemed annoyed about what was said on the panel last night. What was it that none of them got?

Christel



It wasn't so much that I was annoyed -- I thought it was an excellent panel, not to mention a timely one, and I had a great time -- but it often seems that we're not thinking big enough. It was a PR panel on use of social media, and yet a lot of folks seem more concerned with what social media will do to their own profession and practice than on how they can craft new and compelling ways of using social media.

I was annoyed by the audience comment that social media are just tools in the PR professional's toolkit. I couldn't disagree more. Ok, they are "tools," but they're tools belonging to users and used for the purpose of the everyday: chatting, sharing, staying in touch, etc. The question of Who Owns Social Media comes up here. Chris Heuer and Cathy Brooks just moderated a discussion on this that I missed, but the question is important. Users own social media -- without us there's no point in talking about tools. Companies that build social media own social media -- without them there's no point in talking about users. But does PR, or do marketing and advertising own social media? No -- they have rights of access and if they use our talk tools respectfully and give us something compelling to engage with, they're welcome to count social media as part and parcel of an outreach toolkit.

I could not agree more and it's very frustrating when PR folks don't get this... especially since I work at a PR firm and get lumped in with the rest of them ;-)

Jeremiah put it well when he said that the PR industry does a better job of representing its clients than it does of representing itself. He's right. I suspect that PR professionals are good at what they do because they are attentive and concerned, responsive to a client's needs, interests, and goals, and more interested in doing that job well than stumping for their own reputations. But in the case of using social media, which are not just another distribution channel, don't PR professionals need to take end users (the client's potential audience) into account? Isn't there a third party at the table here? We have tracking and measurement tools in order to listen in on social media PR pickup. So shouldn't it be important to designsocial mediaPR campaigns that not only please the client but are appealing and compelling to social media users? Isn't this a programming and content creative challenge, more than just a distribution problem?

I agree with the person that said that PR is about public relationships. The problem is deeply rooted if you ask me. PR practitioners should always take the third party at the table into account. That also counts for reporters. My personal philosophy has always been that reporters are more important contacts to me than clients are. It may sound naive or arrogant, but in the end everyone is better served. I've always seen my job as a facilitator between organizations and the outside world. My role is to help build trust, credibility and mutual understanding. That is done through communication, building relationships, creating awareness and delivering on promises. I don't want to brag, but I feel lucky that I work at a company that has this view of PR.

You and I have talked about this, and I've pitched the idea that PR and marketing on social media should move from a brand impression model to a conversational, or participatory branding model. That consultants such as myself, hailing from the social media industry, ought to draw inspiration from content creatives, and not tool builders. Those who make our TVs don't make our TV shows. It's the task of PR to invent new kinds of "commercial conversation" appropriate for use in social media. Give audiences something to get involved in. Like that "packaged care" care package idea i threw out for UPS. Story lines and meaningful brand initiatives that complement a brand, enhance and attach to its image, but which are rooted in the everyday. Branding in social media should, I think, start with the audience (users) not with the brand. It's a shift of perspective, from talking about the brand to talking with consumers.

I think these two go hand in hand. First, I don't think that brand advertising will be replaced by conversational marketing -- they'll exist side by side. Second, even if you start with the audience, a company has to think about who they are in the relationship with their audience. What is their identity, what do they have to offer, how are they different from others... in other words branding and positioning questions. Having said that, because a brand is not a person, the identity of a brand can be defined by its users/customers/fans... and the two worlds start to blend.

What do you think? Am I off base on this? Is it not a matter of a new community of practice within PR agencies, possibly working with social media experts, and a new breed of social media content creatives? Is this possible? Can PR agencies, as Jeremiah suggested, develop the skill set required, and so not "lose control" of the message but develop new competencies around creative participatory messaging?

Last night's discussion demonstrated for me that PR people *do* have a hard time grasping social media. The fact that the discussion was focused on big blogs, news and analysts on Twitter shows that we were looking at social media through a PR prism, hence we start talking about tools. I think that there are agencies out there that get it. Horn Group is probably one of them, so is Edelman I think. Time will tell if we, as an industry, were able to change fast enough and if there is still a need for traditional media relations work (that is often synonymous with PR) in 10 years from now.

The exchange then continued, with Christel again in tangerine.

Absolutely agree with you. I've been talking to several other folks about what feels like a change in the overall climate, politically, socially, economically, climactically. Since you see yourself as a facilitator, you're in a good position to balance what you know of your client's interests with what you know of its audience. It think there are some great opportunities out there for proactive branding and especially in promotion of social good. That's where I think PR could be generated naturally and organically: where companies have something to talk about, and which needs audience support. Less of conventional image branding and more of active social engagement. Brands are very powerful, and they stand to gain a lot if in social media I think they can extend their "image" by paying less direct attention to it, and as you say "allow it to be defined by users/customers/fans."

But we ought to develop a social media playbook. Set up some distinctions among brands, companies, products, services, events, and so on. Draft the types of "plays" that would fit different industry types, such as consumer products, retail, entertainment, fashion, niche, tech, local and small business, etc. Then come up with the different types of stories, formats, and media types that brands could use for social media Q/A, recommendations, help desk, resident expert tips, and other creative applications. And develop new and dynamic, participatory versions of what many companies put on their web sites (FAQ's, troubleshooting tips, advice, event calendars, and so on). Think outside the box and get beyond using twitter as a fax with links.

What do you think? Could we not learn from hundreds of years of drama and story-telling, draw from TV and news programs for formatting inspiration, adapt from games, puzzles, competitions, and all manner of popular cultural past-times, and Mark Burnett didn't come up with Survivor by following best practices! He simply looked at what makes TV entertaining -- and realized that the audience could be put on TV and that everyday people were as interesting as celebrity actors. Isn't social media to PR in a way what reality TV was for entertainment? Is that too far out?

You bring up some great additional points. PR can play an important role in getting the organic stories out. Good PR people are great listeners and find the stories that a buried inside companies -- you often have to dig for them. If PR people are creative too, they'll find entertaining ways to put out these stories. They also listen to the outside world and feed that back into the organization -- again the facilitator role. In the best examples of social media use by brands/companies, listening leads to real change. The example of mystarbucks that someone gave last night as a place for feedback to Starbucks that has led the company to change products and operations. (coincidentally, Edelman works with Starbucks)

Right on. PR might possibly be best positioned as the agency most likely to create new brand facets and faces, because PR would seem to know how to caretake brand reputation, interpret and analyze response, and recommend next steps. The skill set ready at hand in PR is a touch of the musical ear and pitch perfect hearing. In some ways social media ought not frighten PR, but instead catch it like a breath of fresh air! A medium, if approached respectfully, for conversationalists!

So on that note, let's post this!

Adrian

The Topsy-Turvy World of Social Media

This short slideshow has been sitting about on my machine for months. This morning, for no particular reason, I decided to wrap and post it.

It's a reflection on some of the paradoxes of social media, seen from the perspective of the user experience. But instead of doing a normal description of social media, this time I explore the ways in which identity, presence, connections, relationships, communication, even time, get warped and distorted by mediation.

While it may read cynically, it's not -- and I'm not cynical about online experiences. That said, I do use the strategy of exaggeration to expose deeper truths within. Whether this is fair or not is for you to judge!

The Topsy-Turvy World of Social Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

All the Commentary That's Fit to Print

There is an interesting example of the disruptiveness and transformation of new and social media in the New York Times newspaper today. Unfortunately, it really only comes through in the print version. That's because in today's article on the mayor of Moscow's recent infrastucture investments in South Ossetia, the New York Times has elected to print comments posted originally to its livejournal blog.

It only hits you when holding the paper version of the Times how the conversational DNA of social media has changed the ecosystem for news overall. Even when reprinted in the New York Times, comments come across as the slightly off-color and perhaps off-key commentary that they are -- the boisterous and proud weltanschauung of their spirited Russian authors audible between, through, and behind the lines.

The Times may have wished to make Russian responses available to the domestic US audience, the blog's popularity having become a bit of news of its own. It may have wished to feature some of the many perspectives Russians hold on their iconoclastic mayor. Either way, seeing blog comments on paper drove home just what we mean by "distributed conversation," and "conversational media."

Russians React to Article on Moscow Mayor’s Ventures

Utilizing Social Media for Marketing: Tips

In our never-ending quest to define social media -- whether for ourselves or for our clients -- there's one tendency that stands out, and I think it's the result of a simple semantic slip. We refer to social media as if it were a thing, an object or technology, in short, a noun. Well yes, social media applications are tools and technologies. But social media is also a verb: : experiences, practices, conversation, talk. We switch back and forth sometimes between describing social media and its industry applications: social media marketing, distributed conversations, social networking. But in general, and in part because we are hail from the technology industry, we stand by the noun.

I'd like to explore the verb.

There are four views of social media that organize most of the industry's conversation:

• The builder's view from the perspective of technology


• The startup's view from the perspective of adoption


• The user's view from the perspective of experiences


• The marketer's view from the perspective of distribution

While each of these is valid on its own terms, none is sufficient by itself to describe "social media." But there is one view that is privileged, and that is the user's view. If an application fails to deliver a compelling user experience, there will be no application worth speaking about. No application adopted, no business funded, no market reached.

Now, social media are not just used by users. They're used also by the companies built around them; used by the advertisers advertising within them; and used by the designers and architects who build them. Since not one of these groups "owns" social media, and since none takes the position of the end user, who knows best what a social media tool should be like, how it works (in practice), or for what it is used?

If there's one thing in the way of PR, marketing, and advertising professionals succeeding in their use of social media, it's that many of us are limited by the interests that govern our perspective. Thankfully, we can learn a lot by taking positions other than our own. The builder learns from the user. The founder, from the marketer. The marketer from the user.

I'd like to attempt the marketer's perspective. How might social media best and most successfully serve their purposes?

In conversations with marketing professionals I often hear of the need for real case studies and examples. SNCR has many to cite. Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang continue to dig up gems. But for all the tools out there, we suffer a shortage of best practices and success stories.

A marketer might easily conclude that social media are not ready for distribution. But I think the challenge for social media in the marketplace is not in their lack of utility. Rather, I think, they're simply being under-utilized. Under-utilized not because the technologies are incapable of meeting the marketer's needs: but that the creative and campaigns deployed misuse the media.

These are tools and applications built by the people for use by the people. They were not not intended as new distribution channels for commercial messaging. Therefore any successful social media marketer should pack away the commerce and converse with authenticity. Users are not there to receive the messages of marketers, but are there for their own purposes. There's a connecting line between the phone line and online, and that line is drawn between the commercial and the personal.

Social media serve highly local, personal, and episodic purposes. Conversations are fast, disjointed, and discontinuous. In other words, they have little in common with mass media and broadcasting. Talk starts with the user more than with published content. It unfolds in front of an audience on the medium, not outside of it. Commercial participation needs to come off the screen and embed itself.

Can it? I think yes, if the marketing perspective takes the position of the user.

We're talking about a shift in marketing from impression to expression, and from image to relationship. Messages will get recognition if they are meaningful. And they will get "distribution" if they are retaleable. On blogs, PR and marketing want to be contextual. On social networking sites, marketing and advertising wants to be actionable.

Social media and mass media have one thing in common: communication. So let's look at the communication needs of the industries most interested in reaching social media: PR, marketing, and advertising.

PR

• the content is news, the mode is the release, the form is a brief (narrative), the connections possible are to the company profiled, the news announced, the testimonials offered, the persons involved.
  

Marketing

• the content is image, mode is a branding campaign (image + message), the form can take multiple media, the connections possible are consumer interest, impressions, and associations with the message's connotations and thrust.
  

Advertising

• the content is an offer, mode is campaign with call to action (image + call to action), the form can take multiple media, the connections possible are the relevance and appeal of the offer, and means by which to act on it.
  

The above are descriptions of how commerce seeks to benefit from communications media, be they mass or social. But if we believe that users run social media according to their own interests, how do commercial concerns ply their craft in an industry that is user-centric? What do they do differently to participate in the language of social media users?

Let's take a look at three distinguishing aspects of social media: their transformation of how we talk, how that talk is distributed, and what kinds of relationships we maintain while talking.

Social media provide new forms of talk, using multiple media types, across many different platforms, in long and short form, in front of different kinds of audiences, and appearing of course in a diverse number of forms: from pages to "streams." Commercial interests need to learn these forms of talk, as they would need to learn any new mass media format. Because most campaigns still rely heavily on banner and display advertising, the opportunities ahead for embedded and conversational advertising are great.

We might consider, for example:

• New socially-interactive ad units


• New types of content, group, event, and conversation sponsorship


• New advertising units to take advantage of the medium's many kinds of talk: reviews, recommendations, invitations, questions and answers, tweets, feeds, and so on


• New types of social games with embedded and actionable (playable) ads


• New kinds of narrative, including branching and participatory stories


• Feed-based marketing that offers event tickets, time-sensitive discounts, and so on to friends


• Sponsored reviews and recommendations appealing to those who spot trends and share discoveries


• Question/Answer formats appealing to end user expertise

Social media provide new means of distribution, using many social platforms, on which different kinds of audiences are assembled, for talk that is fast or slow, structured or loose, categorized or streaming, and using all media types available (text, message, video, game, animation, audio). Commercial interests might implement campaigns in multiple media types and for different applications. Here again, interactive and online ad agencies are still using conventional web 1.0 approaches, so there are wins ahead for new creative efforts.

We might consider, for example:

• Feed-based marketing


• Feed-based and direct-action advertising offers


• Social applications built around popular online social activities


• Social ad networks


• Mobile promotions tied to location or social networks


• User interest-based and targeted promotions

Social media offer new types of relationship, including closed groups of affiliates, colleagues, co-workers, and friends, friend-networks, follower audiences, blog subscribers, and more. Commercial interests can appeal to the network as well as the individual, or to the audience and context in general. And again, many departments would rather run their campaigns from the sidelines, and opt out of directly engaging the social media conversation space. The opportunities for success here, I suspect, are a matter of the depth of engagement commercial interests are willing to test.

Here we might consider:

• Commercial marketing to and through influencers


• Event offers and promotions distributed through inviters


• Branding and advertising to the social graph through top recommenders and influencers


• Group sales and promotions to social networks and trust circles

I feel that I have only touched on what can yet be done. With the user's permission (and that is a big "if," I'll admit, but that said, we love brands and we identify through commodities, so...) there is room for a new kind of "adversation" or "convertising." Consumer interests in consumption and things consumed are real, and genuine -- the threat of spam or commercialization is a matter of how it is handled.

I began by claiming that social media were as much a verb as a noun. Well, so the contents of media are people. People are fragile. But they can be moved. Simply handle with care.

Inspiration from Elsewhere: Social Media and Film Theory

Summertime rolls on here, and when the weather is this good I have a hard time staying online. Months of cold fog and wind loom in the coming winter months; these days of lazy autumnal warmth beckon to be enjoyed. Panic in the markets and economic distress all around haven't been good for job prospecting of late. So my gut instinct this past week saw me outside with books and a thinking cap.

Which has all been very inspirational, as it turns out. There are times when inspiration comes from elsewhere. I found it this week in film theory. I enjoy film theory primarily because I'm a film nut. Film is the art form of the twentieth century, and as it incorporates image, technology, dialog, story, genres, production, characters, performance, and industry, it epitomizes the artistic and creative opportunities of modern times. Like social media and web cultures, film is fascinating both as a medium and as a cultural production. It can be enjoyed as is, and when thought about.

Dipping back into the film theory of Gilles Deleuze this week, I re-discovered a number of concepts that have me very excited. They had to do with my three part model of the social media user experience, and with the construction of various narrative forms in film. The former has me thrilled because the three part model keeps popping up in a number of theories and their resonance with an approach to social media interaction design is encouraging, to say the least. The latter has me thrilled because I've been scratching my head of late when it comes to applications of social media in marketing and branding -- and the huge variety of narrative and film forms explored in film theory offers a cornucopia of ideas for online conversational marketing.

I just want to touch on these briefly, because it may be a while before I'm able to punch out in-depth blog posts. So if you are a theory geek, or interested in how social interaction design can draw from film theory, read on. I'll post later on how these ideas may be applied by practitioners and organizations. I know it doesn't take a film theorist to make a good film -- but it is fun to find confirmation in theory of what makes the film good.

Deleuze uses the sign system, or semiotics, developed by Charles Saunders Peirce to build a system of "images" and signs designed for film, which is unique in that it produces not only image but time. I've written about the difference between page and time-based social media recently -- and I often return to film theory because it offers a means of understanding how time is captured in contemporary representational media. (Where social media differ, of course, is that time is captured in the medium -- take twitter as the best example of a tool that organizes content chronologically -- but is not experienced or consumed in a straight and continuous run of time. Time is continuous in film; discontinuous i social media. And yet in both, time is an ordering principle for the presentation of content to the user/consumer.)

Peirce's signs are, to simplify, the firstness of the thing itself; the secondness of a thing reflected, and the thirdness of a relation. Very cool to me, as my model is based on Self, Other, and Relation. The resonance here works well for social media because the "firstness" relates to the content of a user's direct and immediate expression of Self online; the secondness relates the reflection and orientation to another user (Other); and thirdness to the relationships and social relations captured in social activity (Relation). I had been thinking that my Self, Other, Relation approach resonated well with a view of social relations that distinguishes among monadic, dyadic, and triadic organization. Monadic being Self expression, Dyadic being interpersonal interaction, and Triadic being mediating and relationship-oriented interaction. I know this is theoretical stuff, but the three-part model keeps coming up, and I think that thinking in terms of individuals, pairs, and threesomes (or groups) makes sense as a means of grasping the nature of "social" online.

What Deleuze's film theory brings to theory of film "genres" (a term he would disapprove of) and film forms (he calls them "images") is also contributing to my approach to conversational marketing. I've been thinking of late that the key to social media branding involves first moving away from an "image branding" approach to one that is more communicative and participatory. But getting from the insight to actual applications has been a challenge. Knowing that the medium is young yet, and using film theory and history as a source of comparisons, however, has opened up possibilities for what the future may still hold. If commercial efforts are to successfully use social media at all, I don't expect it to be by simply extending mass media branding and marketing approaches. The arrival of the talkies, and development of filmic techniques (inventions in camera work, lighting, editing, montage, and so on) as well as framing and an acute understanding of the effects of film, have all conspired to produce fascinating forms of entertainment.

I really think the current social media landscape is practically waiting for creatives to take over where the engineers have left off. Would you want television designers to be responsible for what's on your TV? Well that's where we are today: having built the stuff we need the content creatives now to show us what we can do with it.

So back now to summertime ideating -- and to bringing concepts into the daylight.


Related:
My own research notes on the theorists Niklas Luhmann, Gilles Deleuze, and Harold Garfinkel in relation to understanding social media, and theorizing social interaction design.

Darwin days are here again, or, the Led balloon

In this Mother of all Meltdowns, tech talk is bound to turn to matters of survival and endurance. While the market may have let out a sigh of relief today, fundamentals are grim all around. A world-wide economic contraction is under way, and any pause in the financial market's panic is likely to be only fleeting.

But as I like to say, mother is the necessity of invention. And invention is the mother of all silicon valley companies. Mashable today runs a brief on how to draw inspiration from hard times: Recession is the Mother of Tech Invention. Can social media startups take advantage of tough times to push innovation farther and faster?

It is not just the pressure cooker of economic distress that drives innovation, however. It is also the end of the honeymoon, the days of daily evangelism that characterize the good times in the new tech world. The optimism of tech innovators is greatest when the "new" is in "tech," and the tech is new. It's an optimism fueled by early adopters and the blush of breaking industry news. The forward-looking anticipation of an upward-trending line, whether that line traces a growing user base, feats of financing, market adoption, traffic, or plain-old revenues.

It's not that optimism would be misplaced during times like these -- if it's optimism grounded in reality and based on defensible claims. It's just that the overall mood is now anxious, fearful, and uncertain. The future no longer looks bright. It's time for the sunglasses to come off.

For those of us who count on our vision for a living, sunglasses never were much of a help. But now that the future is less clear, foresight may have to depend more on insight than on eyesight. It is time now for innovators to see what they can do with what they have.

When times get tough, the mood in tech swings from excitement to trepidation. No longer do we assume that growth is eternal. No longer do we count on the cooperation of consumers, the attraction of advertisers, or the news of the new. No longer do we spend our days fixed on the daily counters: those statistics that are to the web world the vital signs of our health and wellness. Like the markets around us, we, too, adopt a flight to quality. We start measuring what counts.

The great qualitative reckoning is nigh upon us, like some monster industrial combine come harvest time, a rumbling thrasher chewing chaff for its wheat: Darwin days for the social web machine.

But the fittest will survive, and funding and financing aside, innovation will clock its progress even in tough times. A flight to quality will bring better and more useful features and designs. User experience will preside over technical developments, and real social utility will drive the engine of growth. We will strip away what we don't need and focus on what we do. And as the climate changes, so too will our paradigms.

Lest conservation threaten innovation, this generation too will learn that invention does not end with self-preservation. It will learn that what matters is not the survival of an individual (company), but rather the species. That the design is in the social, in the milieu, or the ecosystem. Ours is an ecology of new socio-technical practices, a culture of communication that thrives within an environment of emerging habits of use. The companies that survive in these changing conditions will be those that best understand their cultures. Not their own company traits, features, or attributes, but the activities that they help to enable.

Social media companies today need to know not what they do, but what users do with them. Not what they are like, but why users like them. Not who they are, but who their users are. Companies that innovate only on the basis of what they are, and not for how they are used, will fail to see how and where they belong in their environment. The environment has changed, and success will come to those best suited and adapted to these new conditions.

It would be wise for us now to lose some of the hubris that can work so well during the good times, and to adopt some of the realism better suited for bad times. For according to the laws of natural selection, it is not the species that select their environment. It is the environment that does the selection.

The Now Web: Not Now, or Not Yet?

I have my Stanford reunion coming up tomorrow. At the risk of dating myself, it's my twentieth. I wrote my thesis at Stanford on an Apple Macinthosh, which required swapping out floppy discs in order to run Microsoft Word (on one) with my ever-expanding tome on the other. Drafts were printed on a dot matrix printer, and in the final weeks of each quarter Meyer Library was overcome with a chattering morse-like din that I can recall to this day. It was our version of an echo chamber.

For we did not have email. We did not even have modems.

In preparation for the reunion, some of us have encouraged our classmates to join Facebook. Of a class of about 1650 students, around 300 of us are on Facebook, and 80 of those 300 have joined the reunion group page. Only ten of us have listed twitter accounts. Clearly, we belong to a different generation. We stand for the Not Now social media users. Or possibly, the Not Yet social media users.

I don't know if this speaks to a generation gap or an experience gap. But if I belong to a generation that "doesn't get" social media, it is not entirely because we're computer illiterates. Many of my classmates have had rockstar careers in the tech industry. I seem to remember that some 40% of Oracle's new employees in 1989 were recent Stanford grads. If anything, we are a bridge generation: the first to use desktops, but prior to the domestication of the Internet.

The experience gap is not inexperience with machines, but is inexperience with their unique kind of social presence and interaction. We're not used to the practice of posting profiles about ourselves (I exclude myself), and of keeping constant contact (in a discontinuous and partial sort of way) with friends and colleagues. We're phone-based and email-based, and at our stage in life, time simply doesn't afford us the surplus attention with which to attach ourselves to the social web.

Time would be the reason most of us would cite for our online invisibility. But I think that there's something more.

For lack of a better phrase, I'll call it the "alienation" of social media. To integrate social media into your daily life you need to project yourself into it. You need to be able to live in a kind of time that's very different from the time of the everyday. You need to be able to pay attention without bankrupting your focus and concentration, need to be able to sustain high levels of availability to a world that's neither "here" nor "there," again, without dissociating from the here and now.

Computers were, to my generation, a tool, machine, an object: outside of us. We learned to use them as a means of extending our abilities and activities. In McLuhan's classic use of the phrase, computers were an extension of us. An extension, but nothing more. The machine was an object, and anything we did with it, and it with us, was simply that. The PC was an object, not a world. Turn it off, and nothing.

The social web is more than McLuhan could have seen. The social web is not an "extension of man" but a "network." By dint of its connectivity, it has communication. By dint of communication, it has relationships. By dint of relationships, it is a world. And as a world, it is in time. Those of us who are frequent users of social media know this time as a sense that there's ongoing activity "out there" -- regardless of whether we're on or in it at the time. Turn off the machine today, and wait.

To know what a social technology does, turn it off, not on. What is does is what you miss.

Fred Wilson describes the Now Web as the breed of "micro-blogging" applications and services we know from Twitter's storied success this year. A raft of lifestreaming applications now serve users who, unlike much of my generation, can and do live (at least for a time) in social media. I think the reference to "web" and "blogging" for tools in this space is a misnomer. For they're not really writing tools, but speaking tools. With a different kind of speaking, and of conversation, of course.

If profile-based social networking sites are page-based, lifestreaming apps are time-based.

The Now Web is engaged in not by writing (blogging), but by being in the flow (or by observing the flow from the river's edge, if that be your preference). The needs of time-based applications are different from those of the "conventional" web. If web 1.0 is page-based and print-derived, now-web is time-based and radio-derived.

Twitter is the internet generation's ham radio.

The businesses and applications designed around twitter, its siblings and cousins, will do well to consider the ways we relate to content and communication when it is time-based (further thoughts on designing lifestreaming apps).

• We are less likely to search, more likely to browse, skim, or check.
  
• Content comes in the form of news, announcements, reminders, and greetings -- speech-based acts not written reflections, arguments, or opinions.
  
• Messages lay a claim to our attention in the present -- not later or whenever is good for us.
  
• Content is organized around the now, which lacks the structure of taxonomy, genre, or other form.
  
• And if written content makes a claim to thinking, lifestreamed content is more likely to make a claim to attention: we engage in social encounters through our mutual acknowledgment and awareness of one another
  
• If the claims made in written content are "linguistic" -- that is, they are linguistically-mediated expressions -- lifestreamed content is more likely to be gestural, suggestive, indicative, relational.
  
• If the appeal made in written content is designed through statements, arguments, or narratives, then in the world of lifestreaming, it is more likely to be an appeal to acknowledgment and awareness.
  

Every medium screens back physical participation in communication and interaction, while also amplifying particular modes of expression and engagement. Lifestreaming applications screen back the sense of being in time, and of being with others in time. But they extend and amplify time by connecting multiple threads of time (each of us having our own).

It's early days yet for time-based social media and for social interaction design frameworks best suited to them. As we develop designs, interfaces, features, and new ways of engaging with others, with content, and with timelines appropriate to time-based and not page based social media, I suspect that we will be surprised. I believe the word is "serendipity": the discovery of something surprising that comes at just the right time.

Social media and the job of PR

I have to admit that my gut reaction to PR on twitter is a sinking one. It makes me wonder if the party's over -- if the spamification of twitter is just around the corner, and it's time to migrate once again. Foolish thoughts, or not. All new media mainstream at some point during their lifecycle. And yes, early adopters and core users often flee in droves for smaller and as yet undiscovered niche services. But I digress.

Twitter would seem a perfect tool for Public Relations. It's a posting service. Links can be embedded, and tracked. It is conversational but it's not immersive like IM or chat. And it's essentially opt in, insofar as users elect to follow you.

But social media PR folks like to recommend to their clients that they adopt micro media and conversational tools. "Join the conversation!" was the refrain we heard most over the past year. So where does public relations then rest? With the PR firm or with the company itself?

Sabrina Horn, head of the Horn Group, is quoted in a piece by Tom Foremski on social media adoption:

""Eventually social media will replace a lot of traditional PR but there will still be room for both," says Ms. Horn. And companies need to understand the best combination for their business. She says some clients want to rush into "social media" without considering what it means and the commitment that has to be made."

Every company is a media company . . .

I've often spoken about how every company is now a media company and needs to master the new media technologies at our disposal, such as RSS, blogging, Twitter, social media, etc. But being a media company requires a commitment, it is not a "campaign" that runs for a few months and finishes--it is a long term commitment and not everyone understands this aspect and what that means."

True indeed, and I fully agree that social media use should be mutually-engaging. Company and customer. Reciprocity is essential for trust, and is a core value principle in social media generally speaking.

One of the key benefits of social media engagement, however, is supposed to be what can take place when companies embrace transparency and open-ness. Communication with customers is supposed to result in opportunities for co-collaboration (around products, services, customer service, and so on).

So my question for PR firms, then, is: who handles the social media campaign? PR or client? If the PR agency handles it, is it incented to be honest with its client about user feedback, commentary, and sentiment? If the client uses it, can it handle itself as well as the PR agency -- does the client risk damaging PR campaigns if it gets involved directly? Just who is the best person, and in which organization, to serve as "spokesperson" in social media?

Startup your Social: Enhance Your Social Utility

Financial news of the world this week may now be sinking in amongst the hereto protected economy of the startup world. Many of us will now hold more tightly onto the purse strings in the hopes of stretching out what might be a finite runway to success. I went through this, like many, eight years ago, and the quiet that followed wasn't much fun.

But there's still time for many to make it work. If I were at a VC firm, or heading up a startup today, I'd look more closely now than ever at product and service differentiation. If you have now built the application, done the engineering, and established a user base, now is time to focus on social interaction design. Don't stop at technology design. And while you might be compelled to integrate the features that are quickly becoming standard among social web applications, don't stop there either. Think further and harder about your designing your social interactions. Your equity is in your users and how they use your product — that's the utility, personal and social, that you should leverage to distinguish yourself and capitalize on success.

Here are just a few thoughts and tips that I've gleaned from working with startups and from analyzing the sites I've used:

Users have Personalities
All users are not alike. And this is more important among social media users than in any other kind of designed product. Those users that get the most out of your site or application are the ones that will attract further growth.

In social media, for example, users have different ways of talking and communicating. They have different relationships to other users, and to audiences in general. Different ways of using and consuming information. And different perceptions of social trends. (I'm oversimplifying to keep this short.)

Personality types
Here are some personality types -- you will recognize which would use your site, and for what:

Self-talkers: these are users who are comfortable talking about themselves in front of an online audience (including but not limited to friends). Posting, tweeting, and sharing are simple and straightforward ways of using social media. (Note that the vast majority of people find social media use to be somewhat narcissistic, or juvenile, and don't connect with the self-promotion prevalent in social networking and conversation media. But they're not our users.) These users are important content creators and activity contributors.

EmCees: these are users who get people together, who link, distribute, circulate posts and comments. They are on stage, but not to speak their own minds. Rather, they participate by acknowledging and recognizing those they respect (and often, want to be associated with). These users are important connectors and facilitators.

Mediators: these are users who are aware of "where people are at" and who attend to relationships, both their own and those of others. These users are not on stage but are active in the audience. They are important care-takers.

Critics: these users deepen conversation and forward the ideas suggested by many of the self-talkers. They explore, research, and often read more than self-talkers. Their contributions are important for the richness and discovery of social media content.

Experts: these users, like critics, go deep, but they enjoy being known as experts and protect and serve their reputations. Where a critic may be committed to truth or integrity, and to the content itself, the expert draws that content expertise around him or herself. Expert contributions are important because so many of us follow experts and their recommendations.

Inviters: Inviters use social media to maintain a family or network of people they care about enough to invite (to stuff). They mine the web for events, activities, and news and are happy to share it because it keeps them and their networks active -- without drawing attention to what they themselves have to contribute. Inviters gain from distribution and are critical to the medium's service to events.

there are more, such as jokers, seducers, organizers, and lurkers, but in the interest of time....

Use Cases
Use cases for your service fall into two categories: individual user use case and social use cases. Each is important. You probably know your individual use cases -- and in fact were probably building with those in mind. They have to do with conventional uses and utility, but also include psychological payoff and reward (see above for what hooks different kinds of users).

Social use cases are more complex. Most social media promise utility in use -- that is in the act of using the tool. But many also promise utility and value in what's left behind for later consumption, e.g. by non-participants. Yelpers may enjoy reviewing and networking, but the majority of Yelp's pageviews come from non-users. So if you have a service that leverages user participation to create content (niche vertical, topic, theme, community of practice) make sure that your social features lend themselves to high-value content for those non participants also.

Social Practices
Social practices are what come out of individual use when individual user activity is aggregated. You can offer the individual user an experience but have little control over the emergent social practices. Stories of social media engendering unintended practices abound, and if the practice you facilitate is against your business objectives, you're in trouble. Dating or "hooking up" can kill a service that's intended for serious use. As a lack of flirting may kill a site that is supposed to be high in emotion.


Those are just a few tips. I think social interaction design is a vastly under-stated aspect of social media -- and is as important as technology on which it rests.


Related:
My slide shows on social interaction design, psychology of the user experience, and social media user competencies
Fred Wilson's My Thoughts On "Startup Depression"
Techcrunch roundup of Startups Best Positioned To Weather A Downturn

Swurl: lifestreaming and timelining

Like many of you, I simply can't keep up with the river of lifestreaming applications hitting public beta this year. Many seem to simply do the same thing, more or less, with a bit more of this or a bit more of that to differentiate each from its competitors. But social apps are bound, perhaps more even than "conventional" software, to conform to best practices. Why? Because they are social applications. Social applications succeed only if they can extend the individual user experience out into new and interesting social experiences.

And they do have to be interesting -- for social applications, again more than conventional software, must be interesting. More often than not they are interesting because they are used as tools for talk. Talking with, to, at, amongst, in front of, behind, and to the side of. Talking with friends tends to be interesting to those involved simply because it is among friends. But where the face to face dimensions of social interaction are also rewarding for the obvious reasons, social applications must deliver a working substitute. There is no real "spending time together" online.

Even chatrooms, which are as much a precursor of lifestreaming as anything else online, can only approximate this sense of togetherness. I recall early days in IRC chatrooms where that sense of being there or of being in it was as much due to the suspense and waiting (for somebody to type out their response) as it was due to the "room" itself. One might even argue that this pressure of time grows in the user the slower the technology is to record and transmit time. The longer the latency, the greater the waiting, and thus the greater the anticipation, suspense, and urgency! (Is it not said that suspense in film is simply the time that it takes for something to happen?).

Swurl.com is interesting because it has a visual timeline of the lifestream (pictured above). In calendar format, and well-designed, the timeline looks good and is an attractive visual representation. It's low on conversational content and talk, but it captures the past of a user's activity in a compelling presentation. Plurk.com also has a timeline, but one that is used to steer interaction (and which looks more like a horizontal river display). Not only does Swurl's calendar provide thumbnails of pictures and shortcuts to posts, it expands to accommodate periods of heavy activity. All days do not look alike. I like that.

This variation is important in lifestreaming apps. In contrast to the profile-based site or service, the stream stands in for the profile. The person's talk stands in for profile elements. These choices make sense, because the call to action in a lifestreaming service is talk. It's not browsing, searching, or navigating. At least not quite yet (I believe we're ready for more order and structure). Really, each message/post/tweet in a lifestreaming app is its own call to (inter)action, which is also why most users are in it "now" or never.

Which makes Swurl's representation of past user activity interesting to me. Most lifestreaming have stayed away from the archive of past activity (what's the pleasure in paging backwards through a user's posts?). But there's a lot of value in past activity, and visual coverage of the past can take many forms (think Edward Tufte). We've seen none of them yet (Chirpscreen's slideshows come to mind, though it would be nice to see them become actionable) but I'm certain that we will.

If twitter is the power curve of lifestreaming, then apps like swurl might show us some of the value in the long tail -- the long tail being the past. To picture this, take the standard long tail graph and turn it sideways. The Present is the curve, the Past is the tail.

Mining the tail of time is mining in depth rather than mining across connections. Mining the connections of past time, for lifestreaming apps, might mean drawing connections across the past times (pastimes, experiences, too) of a site's users. Currently, Swurl engages conversations around a user and his or her posts. But we could imagine indexing user streams for the purpose of making connections and extracting content. After all, a user's post posts, talk, uploads, etc are used by many applications to predict or anticipate choices and preferences.

I'm excited to see what Swurl, with minimal complexity, has done to wrap a bit more around lifestreaming than we get out of tools like twitter. Twitter will remain for me my primary talk tool, as it has and will continue to have the best audience awareness. But if you wanted to imagine social networking, and profile-based social networking around lifestreaming instead of profile pages, Swurl would be a good place to start.

Join me on Swurl!


Related reading:
Readwriteweb on Swurl
Techcrunch on Swurl

Lifestreaming apps and designing time and flow

Twitter's success over the past year has given birth to a new category of social media applications. Lifestreaming apps, known also as flow applications, permit users to publish a steady stream of online activity. Readwriteweb.com has a primer and later published a roundup of 35 lifestreaming apps, some of which are already defunct. Where these apps aggregate comments, friends, content topics, and media types, they can also be categorized as aggregators of distributed conversation (see the Techcrunch article on Friendfeed for more.)

Lifestreaming applications pose an interesting challenge to designers. From the perspective of social interaction design, site organization, navigation, publishing rules, and content organization shape the user experience, and thus the social practices that emerge around lifestreaming. Twitter has set a convention based roughly on a hybrid of email inbox and chat: tweets flow from newest to oldest. Third party twitter apps hew to the convention for the most part, eschewing additional navigation or structure for the simplicity of the stream. Broadly speaking, lifestreaming applications serve as a news wire service or news scroller of personally-relevant announcements and messages. The content sourced for publication is selected by the user.

I suspect, however, that we're only at the beginning of the design cycle of these applications. Now that we have established the utility of a twitter (or friendfeed, facebook status, activity, or news feed) as both social and personal utility, focused around talk and speech rather than writing and publishing (e.g. blogs), we might anticipate diversity. This, I suspect, will come as it normally does in variations of the apps themselves, and in their application to social practices. We have spent much of this year on the tools, technologies, and companies providing lifestreaming applications but relatively little time exploring their user and social experiences.

Consider the user experience of time-based talk vs page-based talk. If most of the social web is organized around the publishing/print/web page model, which subordinates chronology to topicality, then lifestreaming tools do the opposite. They subordinate topicality (search, browse, drill down, categorization, relatedness by tags, taxonomy, etc etc) to the flow. Flow privileges the present, not the past, and not the enduring. Flow apps put the user in the flow (assuming that s/he is paying them attention), aggregating the multiple times/presents of one's friends into a common stream. They give the illusion of togetherness, as does any aggregation of content online, but in the now, in time, rather than in place, such as on a page/site. In fact this illusion works greatly to Twitter's benefit -- this sense that while each of us sees a unique timeline, we feel that we're on the same page (!). Most of us do not use Twitter for search, browse, or navigating content, but for a sense (foreground when we use it; or background when it's on standby) that we're "there." "Being there" is a matter of being in time.

If aggregating timelines is the design challenge addressed by lifestreaming apps, the current basket of sites and services leaves much room for innovation. By which I don't mean improvement. Social web design is iterative, to be sure. Not only are we all in beta, but each release of functionality or design updates engenders new user experiences. And as new user experiences accumulate and coalesce, new social practices take shape. The UI of social media is the social interface. Page-based social sites have been developing for years; lifestreaming apps are by contrast relatively new.

The techniques we use in designing page-based services haven't yet found their way to time-based apps. Scale, rank, featured, comparison, grouping and categorization, tagging, and more. More significantly, the value in time-based apps ought to be content over time. So, in this case, talk over time. Imagine twitter snapshots, timelines, and histories. Time-based apps will have rhythm and pacing where page-based apps don't. Time-based apps have moments, episodes, periods (of time).

News, for example, has its message content and then its urgency. The significance of news is as much a matter of its arrival as it is what is said. News is one of those strange kinds of message whose importance is announced on its envelope (Urgent!). Given that twitter now serves as a newswire, and is used so often for news (and not "What are you doing", which is rarely newsworthy), we could imagine interface solutions that explore the temporal dimensions of talk and speech over the content dimensions (which have been mined by search, browse, and other page-based navigation conventions).

To get more specific, and to explore these thoughts further, I will address these ideas further by looking at several lifestreaming apps in the days ahead.

Related reading
Stowe Boyd on Lifestreaming
Brian Solis on Lifestreaming
Mashable on Lifestreaming

Social media: Social Approximity?

We have moved beyond "generation gap" differences in technology use and moved into the "experiential gap" in terms of use and understanding. Your experience with an application such as Twitter provides an understanding that cannot be communicated by reading about it or even being told about it.

Tom Foremski recently penned on twitter in which he notes the growing experiential gap that separates those who use new social media tools from those who don't. Those who use, get it, and those who don't, don't. Well, not surprisingly, this digitally dividing line is also the void that old media needs to bridge, if it, like its users, are to join the ranks of the initiated. The adoption curve sweeps like the arc of a #suspension bridge (!) plotting the line of escape from the old and tired traditional media landscape to the bright and shiny shores of the new.

As Marshall McLuhan (pictured above) insightfully observed:

"The "content" of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph."

Now that bit about the telegraph may be a bit out of dot dot dash date, so simply substitute in "social media" for telegraph and you're back in the present tense. Social media are a recontextualization of old print forms and contents within a new distribution and communication framework (social web). It's not surprising that so many of our social practices (tools and uses) echo, if not amplify, their old media (broadcast) forebears: celebrity, self-promotion, news, anchoring, commentary, top tens, ratings, rankings, and polls (diggs, votes).

Speaking of telegraph, there was also recently a fine piece penned as well as printed by the New York Times on the ambient proximity of new conversation tools like twitter. I prefer talk tools to "micro blogs" because I think the connection is stronger between the acts (talking) than the form (writing). Blogs had sought to be conversational, yes, but clearly twitter is more a talkie than it is a bloggie. (I'll skip the temptation to riff on silent films, inter-titling, and the arrival of the talkies, but the possibilities for extracting something out of "old content and new media" there are rife.)

This Times article artfully testified to the experiential gap, too, describing twitter with the pleasantly fuzzy phrase "ambient intimacy." The intimacy possible over social media is at best approximate, and the proximity at best ambient. Social media can only approximate the relationships and interactions of the real. And in spite of the close contact many of us now have on a daily basis with hundreds of friends and followers, there's an experiential gap between "being there" and simply "there."

French sociologist Jean Baudrillard mischievously likened contemporary media to the peripheral image of thought footnoted at the base of any sideview mirror: "Caution: Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear." Mass media, he believed, distort the real to such a degree that he warned of a new "hyper-reality." Not only do they distort the appearance of reality, but the ambiguity suggested by "may be closer" hinted that media are also destabilizing.

To reverse McLuhan's operational logic, we can deduce that in New Media objects may be more distant than they appear -- which might describe the proximity manufactured across myriad connective webs and online social spaces. In fact, I like to liken social media some times to "social systems in failure mode." Time is discontinuous, communication fails to communicate, relationships are unrelated, attention is unattentive, attraction is distracted, audiences are disaggregated, and so on.

But it is early days still for social media, and were we to look back to the first years of TV, we'd find naught but radio shows revisualized. The migration path from old to new media is yet writing its narrative, and that arc has many more dots to connect before its line can be fully traced. If we overuse (and do we?) mass media forms and contents in how we build and use social media today, is that so surprising? What will come next can arrive only when we have stepped up to it.

Only as cultural and social practices online mature to the point that we can see what we might build next can we stitch a tighter weave, and by warp and woof, wend our way towards a tighter experiential gap.

Aggregators and Sources: People or Content?

I don't know if this bespeaks a major trend, but I've noticed that of the slew of news and friend aggregators, services seem built on a choice between aggregation of content around people (as sources) or aggregation of people around content (as sources). 

The distinction between contributors and contributions is at the core of social media in general. Design limitations, including allocation of screen real estate, navigation schemes, actions and features/functions, and the resulting social content and practices these limitations produce, would seem to suggest that any aggregation tool will stake a preference on either the person or his/her content.

I don't know if this suggests that there's a corresponding division among user preferences and interests: to prefer people over content, or content over people. As users, do we fall into two camps? Are there two types of social media users -- those drawn to the social face and those drawn to the media face? Those who relate to people first, and those who relate to content first? Those who pay attention to the person, and whose trust and interest aligns with personality, relationship, authority, etc? Versus those whose interests connect with content, statements, news, and talk -- over and above the people posting and doing the talking?

But between friendfeed, digg, stumbleupon, socialmedian, twitter, facebook, and scores of others now in the business of assembling audiences around social content, it does seem that some are more conversational (twitter and feed aggregators like FF) and some more topical (digg, socialmedian, the new strands). 

Perhaps, indeed, some of us are more attentive (in general) to who's talking, and some to what's being said.

Radian6 and climate change: views of mainstream, blog, and twitter conversations

Using Radian6 to investigate social media conversations around one of my own personal involuntary preoccupations -- climate change -- I geeked out this afternoon for a while and have these screen shots to share and discuss. What you see above are three topical clouds created by a search across media types over thirty days for the keyword phrase "climate change." (Click it for actual size.) All media (top left) includes blogs and forums, video, images, mainstream online media, and twitter. The top middle shows results from just blogs and forums, and twitter. And the top right window shows results for twitter only.

Below the cloud panes is a topical drill down spanning the same time period: showing results for terms within the "climate change" results. (In other words, a comprehensive survey would require additional searches. Each results in a bucket of results that can then be further filtered and searched.)


I noticed "radiohead" in the twitter view, top right, and clicked it to see posts. (screenshot on left). Cooler heads prevailing, Radiohead had turned down a US promotional gig to spare the air. True or not, I didn't have time to check.

Looking at the results, I clicked the peak on April 21 to see what was up that day. Doh -- earth day. I entered that, and a few other terms, for the screen to the left. (It being earth day every day here in San Francisco, this one had pretty much slipped out through the fissures that crack me up, in my mind, way in the back of my mind.... Ok, honestly, earth day a bit redundant nowadays, isn't it?)

I used the cloud views to find keywords to add to the trend panel. Radiohead didn't register in the trend panel, for example. "Green" is just below "earth day," suggesting that perhaps "Green day" could have taken advantage of some free media coverage (are they still together? I confess I don't recall. Another case of fissure. Fizz-ure... ) Next in prominence on that day were "food," "gas," "action," and "president," which, if I were a writer for The Colbert report, I could have made into a joke, using, perhaps, either "food" or "gas" as the subject of "action" taken against the "president."

Interesting that on Earth day both food and gas were of concern. Food growing or food eating? And seeing as "prices" are just beneath "president," it's possible that food and gas prices may have occurred in Earth day commentary that included administration policies and leadership. Or not. One doesn't want to read between the lines. (Though the lines are pretty close together, and track nicely, so hey, why not?)

As you can see making sense of these verbal trends is not rocket science. Could we have guessed without searching that food and gas prices would come up together? They track with earth day, but to be fair, there was a UN report released that wknd regarding the food crisis. It's possible that they're related. Wouldn't take a poet.

Now what's cool about this tool is that you can read the news sources for any additional key phrases right here. Even view videos. And you can browse a list of influencers (sites and blogs) for the topical profile. Shown here are influencers and a "river of news." Global warming was the biggest hit within "climate change," and shown here are posts that refer to global warming. (Inluencers can be sorted by unique commenters, total comments, enagement (number of comments and length of comment), and topical inbound links.

Now in this view, which focuses on April 20 - 22 (earth day and one day prior and post), there are interesting differences between the topic clouds for mainstream media. Look at the list below. Differences in terms used in the mainstream media, on blogs and twitter, and on twitter alone, are clear. Mainstream media describe a high-level view of the discourse, blogs, commentary on that discourse, and twitter, more personal and actionable conversation.

_____mainstream_____
emissions
issues
america
government
department
public
scientists
national
federal
country
world


_____blogs and twitter_____
save
reduce
live
weather
real
better
information
future
article
action


_____twitter_____
industry
fight
students
right
difference
help
water
citizen
officials
college
sustainability

So far this search has turned up roughly what one would expect of it, and indeed you find what you're looking for when using measurement tools. The benefit of tracking end user conversations such as those on twitter ought to be in the authenticity of twitter talk, and in its speed and immediacy. Radian6, because it updates in real time, can be used to follow these conversations as they happen. That said, it's necessary to supplement twitter talk with blogs and mainstream media, for they provide the narratives, arguments, and semantic map of the conversation space. Topical context is assumed by twitter users (as it is often in chat and IM) -- that context is provided by the slower talk media. At this time, twitter is still very small, and on-topic results for searches on twitter are noisy and fragmented. But for those interested in personal expressions and conversation, and for a read on real-time audience attention and interest levels, there's a lot of potential yet in what twitter can surface.


Note: I did not explore Radian6's tools for influencer results and additional keyword drilldowns in this post.

Social Analytics and Understanding the User

I've been having a fascinating time reading through papers on NextStage Evolution, a company in the business of metrics and online media analysis. And I'm compelled to write briefly on some core methodological principles, primarily because the methodology behind social analytics warrants careful consideration. All of us in this space want to know what the user wants, does, and might likely do. That would be valuable information, and having it would allow us to anticipate and deliver, and engage, with users. Unfortunately, user's don't declare their motives or intentions, and so it is up to analysis to model user interests from user behavior.

I sincerely believe that social media analysis needs to account not only for the user's proximate activities, those being his or her online behavior and actions as trackable by analytical tools (be they within a walled garden social network, on and around blogs, in conversation tools like twitter, or even through social applications and widgets), but also deeper and less available interests. These are the interests that underlie interpersonal interactions, communication, and relationships. And no matter how near or far interactions, communication, or relationships may appear through social media applications, they form the basis of user agency.

Agency is a sociological concept, and it underlies user actions and activities. Agency, to me, involves intentionality and motive, as well as content (information), and is interested (identifies or attaches to an object or subject). User experience is about agency. Interaction design is about agency. And inaction can be about agency, too. Fundamental to the concept of agency is that of self-reflexivity -- that we know what we are doing.

In social situations, activity and interaction are framed. That is, they unfold within a frame, which is to say that they make sense within context, and over a stretch of time. And in social interaction, the frame is often mutually constructed -- two or more people know what they are doing and if asked, would describe the situation they are in with a high level of agreement. Their recognition of the frame would agree even if they are in disagreement with one another.

This contextuality of action, I think, applies to mediated interactions as it does to face to face encounters. The difference is real, but is understood. Some interesting misinterpretations of intent, motive, interest, and so on of course occur online, and indeed can enrich the experience with a touch of play, self-reference, and so on. But as is the case of the comedian who tells a joke about a pope in an airplane telling a story about an ace fighter pilot.... frames can be layered and embedded within one another, and we come out the other end for the most part still making sense.

I bring all of this up because it informs how we read and interpret, and thus also design, anticipate, and model, social media user experiences and social practices. Users provide more than just information and at the same time are less than informing. Our models need to interpret, for example, whether a user has recommended a movie to somebody, in front of a community, to be shared among friends, because she enjoys writing reviews, has a reputable movie blog, is considered (or believes herself to be considered) a movie expert, or believes in the principle of contributing reviews to the common good.

Would we get this from the review itself? Not likely. From envelope information (to whom it's addressed, how messaged, where posted, how delivered)? From comments and their agreement/disagreement? From past movies reviewed? From movie categories covered (e.g. new releases vs film noir). I belabor the point -- it's complex (though do-able). In all cases, however, agency is neither explicit nor stated. ("I hereby submit this movie review to this esteemed blog for the sake of my reputation as a budding film noir critic and blogging habitue".)...

Designing social media to engage users is much simpler than accurately interpreting their actions, for design succeeds as long as users are compelled by their own experience. Users will remain engaged even if the experience is riddled with theft, robbery, and deception. To wit, Vegas. Social interaction designers don't need to know what compels a user, as long as they understand that there is a range of users, and that their system facilitates communication and interaction, as well as an experience of presence which varies user by user, and which leads to social practices in the aggregate. Users work with what is given, on the screen and architecturally, as well as with those others who are present, and participating. Online interactions don't have to be efficient, or even effective, to be rewarding.

But like the anthropologist studying a culture from the outside, or an archaelogist interpreting the meanings of cultural artifacts and found objects, analytical software, as a non-participant, is confronted with a more profound challenge: reverse engineering the artifacts, button presses, posts, comments, ratings, bookmarks and so on left behind by users whose mindfulness or mindlessness would be impossible to measure, and at times difficult to distinguish.

Information about what users do is not available in the information about what users have done.

This is where I tack differently from models based more squarely in data analysis and user activity tacking and measurement. Those methods, and I'm not a qualified statistician, may observe the disaggregated and yet predict in the aggregate, and successfully so, if we are to place any faith whatsoever in the long tail. Metrics may serve purposes of campaign analysis and even management. But engagement (social media marketing) tools would require a communicable messaging and engagement platform. The difference? Agency. Communicable engagement seeks not the acceptance of the user but his or her participation -- it anticipates the significance of agency.

I so strongly believe that social analytics ought to be rooted in an intersubjective framework of action, and not one of information gathering alone, that I'll close with a few quotes from Erving Goffman, master observer of social interactions and mentor in spirit:

"Given a speaker's need to know whether his message has been received, and if so, whether or not it has been passably understood, and given a recipient's need to show that he has received the message and correctly—given these very fundamental requirements of talk as a communication system—we have the essential rationale for the very existence of adjacency pairs, that is, for the organization of talk into two-part exchanges. We have an understanding of why any next utterance after a question is examined for how it might be an answer." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, P. 12

"Note that insofar as participants in an encounter morally commit themselves to keeping conversational channels open and in good working order, whatever binds by virtue of system constraints will bind also by virtue of ritual ones. The satisfaction of ritual constraints safeguards not only feelings but communication, too." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, p. 18

"And just as system constraints will always condition how talk is managed, so, too, will ritual ones. Observe that unlike grammatical constraints, system and ritual ones open up the possibility of corrective action as part of these very constraints. Grammars do not have rules for managing what happens when rules are broken." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, 21

"Uttered words have utterers; utterances, however, have subjects (implied or explicit), and although these may designate the utterer, there is nothing in the syntax of utterances to require this coincidence." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk 3

"The rules of conduct which bind the actor and the recipient together are the bindings of society. But many of the acts which are guided by these rules occur infrequently or take a long time for their consummation. Opportunities to affirm the moral order and the society could therefore be rare. It is here that ceremonial rules play their social function, for many of the acts which are guided by these rules last but a brief moment, involve no substantive outlay, and can be performed in every social interaction. Whatever the activity and however profanely instrumental, it can afford many opportunities for minor ceremonies as long as other persons are present. Through these observances, guided by ceremonial obligations and expectations, a constant flow of indulgences is spread through society, with others who are present constantly reminding the individual that he must keep himself together as a well demeaned person and affirm the sacred quality of these others. The gestures which we sometimes call empty are perhaps in fact the fullest things of all." Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 91




To put this simply, if it were Prime Suspect (or my favorite, Cracker), vs CSI -- I'd pick Prime Suspect.

Climate change and web 2.0

An article on bringing Web 2.0 to bear on climate change caught my eye this sunny and serene Sunday am. It's a short post on Climate Feedback presenting threaded discussion forum for use in managing debate and discussion among those interested in climate change. Conceived as an "argument tree," here's a summary of how it's supposed to work:

The structure requires people to present their comments in one of four categories: issues to be addressed, options for resolving those issues, the pros in favor of various options, and the cons against them. In this way, the debate could become self-organized, making it easier for people to see what’s been said, and whether points have been supported or rebutted.

Mason Inman, for Nature Network

There's no argument with threaded discussion as a means of conducting an exchange. And the tree format shown should work fine as a means of structuring topics. (Keeping users on topic is another, and a separate matter; a community vote or approval system might work as a check on post topicality -- e.g. topical digg.)

But at a more general level, other web 2.0 tools should be able to contribute to climate change conversations. We know already that social activism has benefited from the social web. And fundraising -- to wit, Obama -- along with micro-funding and philanthropy have also made notable headway with the help of web 2.0 sites and tools. In the conversation space, things are a bit murky still. For example, I've got an ongoing interest in sites like change.org, greatnonprofits.org, razoo.com, goodtree.com and others, for their potential in shaping discourse and circulating ideas and sentiments. They offer the hope of shifting cultural dispositions in favor of conservation and ecology-minded consumerism. And insofar as they integrate or contribute to social networking sites, by providing users with green interests and green identities, they help to green affinity groups and cultural trends.

Might there be benefits, too, from twitter and conversation tools? In spreading news and alerting audiences to breaking climate change stories, for example? In shaping sentiment by making green a more visible taste or consumer preference? By demonstrating that green matters to the social media savvy crowd? And most importantly, by illustrating to big media that every week should be green week, every day should be earth day, and that the issue of climate change is not a holiday, special report, or feature, but an ever-present and persistent daily concern?

Of course, the planet's own changing weather may change our reality sooner than we change our mentality. And at the end of the day, green branding may be seen less as a shift in opinion and more as a necessary cultural adaptation. If our practices are a reflection of our views, if what we do is a manifestation of how we talk about it, then talk technologies should indeed have something to offer.

Mining social media

I had some compelling conversations with Joseph Carrabis of Nextstage Evolution this past week at SNCR's NewComm Forum where I was also formulating what I'll be doing this year as a sr research fellow. Joseph's company has a patented method for predicting or anticipating user behaviors online. As described, the patent sounded quite broad, but with or without patent his approach was interesting.

It's based on a number of user profiles based on information. I'm a relational and communication-oriented person, so I took some friendly issue with his approach. Insofar as the social web is a communication space, and social media facilitate talk -- in varying degrees of speed, depth, persistence, contextuality, and topicality, I can't see how a model can ignore characteristics of communication and interpersonal psychology.

When our interactions are mediated, ambiguities of intent, trust, sincerity, motive and so on seep into online communication. Psychology and personality differentiate user behavior as they do in any social encounter, and people engage and respond according to their tendencies, sensitivities, and blind spots.

A combination of user psychology (developed perhaps in the form of personality types modified to suit communication styles online) and information-centric interests and preferences might make for a powerful tool. And as the glut of information online is intensified by the sudden popularity of talk tools like Twitter as well as feed-based applications, anyone interested in reaching users/consumers by interest, affinity, or taste, will need intelligent engagement tools.

This will be a huge market. And the companies that not only succeed on the analytical side of monitoring, tracking, and measuring user behavior but also on the engagement side of giving marketers, publishers, and advertisers targeted, social graph-informed, and actionable campaign management tools will pull in some serious cash.

The social web is a gold mine. And as was the case during the gold rush, it's the guys selling mining tools that will make a killing.

Of Military and Men, or Influencers in the mass and social media

<embed> Influencer </embed>
<type = "military man">
<look = "uniformed">
<display = "next to anchorman">
<play = "when Iraq goes poorly">

<repeat = "as necessary">


According to a feature-length story in the New York Times this sunday it seems that the military has been using Influencers to get its message out. These are the guys that you see on TV news and talk shows extemporizing on their personal and professional experience to lend unique perspectives and insights to what's happening "on the ground" in Iraq. Some of them speak to military strategy and tactics, appearing on TV, and sometimes in uniform, to guide news anchors and civilian discussants.

Apparently these guys have been courted by the Pentagon for years, and during the Rumsfeld years even provided him with talking points. How to reach the audience and simplify the story for them (us).

The military's been doing Influence marketing-style, but in mass media. (There was no mention of these guys having blogs, and I haven't the time to check.) A couple questions spring to mind: Are we surprised? (probably not.) Could this happen in social media? (probably not.)

Mass media according to the rules of corporate media, which is to say that they are owned by large profit-making concerns. While they are as keen on making the news interesting as the blogosphere, their tendency will be to weave new information into a tight and closed narrative form. They tell stories. We in the blogosphere opinionate, bug, goad, poke and disclose. However, the mass media still believe that their best narrative structure is the story. And when the story itself lacks a clear beginning, middle, and (in this case particular) ending, use of experts and authorities shifts the burden from narrative to narrator.

In this they have the gist of Influence nailed, absolutely. But in that Influence is embedded within official and even ideological, partisan, or agency dogma, its utility as promotional speech is exhausted on behalf of official and biased needs and interests. The influence of (ex) military consultants borrows from the professional role and position. It is not the same kind of influence that social media marketers, for example, use when embedded in messages among cultural influencers. These military experts must be brought into the mass media if they are to have and exercise influence. It's not influence borrowed (as in social media) but influence regenerated. Influence not from self-presentation but from re-presentation.

The common challenge facing those of us in mass media is commerce and maintaining the line between commercial and everyday speech that separates advertising and sales, which are discourses lacking authenticity, and ordinary talk, which do lay claim to authority and credibility. The type of influence used in the case noted by the New York Times, however, is one of "officialdom" and the power of position and normative authority.

If in mass media, influence of position and authority can be better maintained than in social media because mass media are top-down talking head news and reporting, sustained by the credibility invested in the medium and business of journalism and broadcast news. The medium, as well as its mode of distribution, more easily maintain the cycle and engine of legitimation that culminates in the appearance of professional experts on broadcast talk shows and the evening news. This is legitimation by control, by production, and by fabrication. It's expertise subject to the editing room.

Social media seek (in theory and in word, at least) a different kind of influence: peer review and approval. The medium and the form of discourse that it supports are wide open. In fact they can approach forms of conversational talk, even. This is no medium for the accreditation and credibility of the role and position -- it's a medium in which credibility is obtained from the risk and exposure of participation and interaction.

All influencers are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Psychological profiling and forensic analysis -- in social media?

Ever since Fritz Lang's "M," featuring a maniacal performance by Peter Lorre in the role of a marked man (literally - ! ) furtively evading a public stirred by published reports of a child molester on the loose, we've had a dark fascination with the mentality of criminals. They are pursued by cops, private eyes, private citizens, mobs and mobsters, and more recently, forensic professionals. Witch hunts aside, the two most common methods of capturing the criminal are with deductive or inductive reasoning: the analysis of evidence, or psychological insight. The pursuers either read the signs of the crime for the criminal behind it, or figure out where he's likely to strike next based on a grasp of his motives and obsessions.

It would be interesting to apply this to social media analysis... One might use site and user behavior and activity to form a bed of evidence, and accompany that with insights into user psychology, habits, tastes, preferences, and other interests, for predictive purposes. With a solid framework marketers and advertisers might more successfully reach the right consumer at the right time. A multiply-targeted and designed campaign, scripted to appeal according to user interests, and launched into the user activities most likely to reach that consumer, and to provide the greatest benefit to the marketer, would eliminate some of the wasted effort of today's online marketing.

It's worth the thought. After all, it took decades for the film industry to produce the genres we're familiar with today. At this time we're still in the nascent stages of creating genres of social activity online -- and truth be told most of them have been designed and engineered by, well, designers and engineers. Content owners and producers, those in publishing and entertainment for example, have yet to engage broadly in using social media tools not only to promote and distribute but to create and develop their properties. So what we know of social media is a reflection still of what the end user does with them -- unencumbered by scripts or production value, but also perhaps wanting for more compelling experiences and narratives.

It wouldn't be difficult to imagine a marketing industry that takes advantage of the bridging opportunities here. Social media marketing vehicles might emerge that are far more interactive, narrative, engaging, and content-rich than the simple viral and pass-along popups and widgets we're seeing even today. This might be a case of wishful thinking, it's hard to tell. But it's safe to say that we've yet to push the frontiers here.

We may still be in social media's era of silent film. Could it be that we've yet to think of what we'll do with the "talkies?"

Hashing through twitter hashtags -- a look at structured conversation

In my ongoing binge to ferret out the social mechanics of twitter third party sites and tools, hashtags deserves attention. It's small, and by all appearances might die on the vine, which would be sad. But if the great culling whose season draws near were to remove hashtags from the social media dna pool, it would be for reasons owing less to the operationaI think and more to fundamental problems with the user experience.

Hashtags make a big demand on the twitterer. They ask that she tag up posts while writing, which requires a) added effort, b) a pause to reflect on meta while composing, c) a sense of the benefit provided to folks who search by tag in the future. (A) and (b) pull the user out of the immediacy of twittering -- not much, but maybe enough to matter.

I remember working with a startup that was into the idea of tagging up chats for better discovery -- of like-minded chatters and of topically-related chats. I thought the idea was great, especially because chats aren't logged, and in theory at least the promise of social web is to connect people around what they talk about (in common). But to get meta from talk requires either automation or a change of user behavior. Either sites and services mine talk for the meta, and build links and suggestions of topics and talkers, or the user declares meta while talking (or just after, as in tagging).

Chat was one problem, twitter is similar. Because twitter is a kind of slow-moving chat. And like all other feed-related sites and tools, twitter I think aims to do more than provide dis-intermediated chat channels. Unless I'm completely mistaken, there are a lot of folks out there who believe that there's value in fast web conversations, call it feeds, micro-blogging, or what have you.

And because it's always hard to structure a conversation and to keep it on topic, not to mention expect users to follow topical threads, the goal of hashtags was to capitalize on what's said *inside* of posts. Their benefit would be to extract topical continuity and consistency from disparate flows (conversations) -- to re-flow if you will, by tag.

The benefit of exposing and surfacing common topical threads from talk accrues primarily to those who come along after the posts have been published. That's the purpose of topical mining, and it's an approach to making the web useful that Google has mastered for pages. But for posts, or conversational turns, the challenge is huge.

Conversation is notoriously poor at providing explicit meta about itself. It's just not how it works or how we talk. We know what we're talking about when we talk, and it involves the person(s) with whom we're talking. We don't declare what we're talking about if it can be already understood. Seo is built on this -- embedding meta in copy and pages for better search results. If you're talking about orchids you're unlikely to speak "flowers" in the same breath. We don't supply meta while talking (Dave Sifry used to describe this as getting meta out of the exhaust).

A lot of social web sites live on the principle of using a small number of active participants to produce content that can be enjoyed by those who come later. The good ones, like Yelp, offload the member-to-member communication from the topical content as much as possible. In Yelp's case, with gestural tokens, a questions page, etc -- to keep the reviews as clean as possible. (Could tweeted reviews work even? They'd devolve into highly subjective recommendations probably.)

Two challenges face hashtags. First is getting the user to tag as an act of talking. Second is that all tags are equal. There's neither vertical hierarchy (tag, subtag, subsubtag) nor modal organization. The latter is interesting, and worth a note, and since I just made it up I need to think out loud here a minute.

Talk is not all equal. Statements of speech can be declarative, performative, can be a form of request or appeal, and so on. Just think of the differences in the kind of utterance that are: invitation, recommendation, flirt, factual declaration, opinion, observation, question, answer. Modal organization of tweets would suggest that in addition to semantic tagging we have statement types: question, recommendation, announcement, link, flirt, and so on. You can see where this goes: Yahoo has Answers, Facebook has social apps, Linkedin has recommendations, Yelp has symbolic tokens, Google has (wait, google doesnt seem to get social. oops), etc etc.

So on hashtags, if you root around, you'll find some totally unorganized examples of this. There are (and oddly or not so oddly enough Germans seem to have gotten into organizing talk -- I lived in Berlin for a year and a half so I've had fun comparing German and English equivalents...). On hashtags there are posts tagged "now," "love" "jokes" -- tags that suggest the modal type of tweet. "Now" is not a topic but leads to conversations about what users are doing. "Love" is as much an expressive identifier (I'm in love, who's in love?) as much as it is a factual identifier. "Jokes" is topical, but it also is an attractor for quips and humor -- and joking is a performative form of speech unto itself if anything is.

When social media work to produce informative content for those who primarily consume, it's because they are a means of production. By analogy to the industrial age, the communication age (our era) uses information technologies as means of production. Communication acts leave behind content. Interaction tools that simultaneously publish to a public, as are all social media, "manufacture" a new form of talk. It's mass media gone social. But we know this already.

Is there a soft or hard threshold, then, for social media tools that ask the user to produce meta while in the act of posting/talking? Believers in the public utility of the social web as a means of democratizing the media and information might say no. Believers in connectivity, communication, and the social utility of social media might say yes. Hashtags sits between the two.

Much of my work involves helping social media companies to engineer interactions and communication for the purpose of producing leftover utility to latecomers and consumers. It's a social engineering challenge -- call it the art of generating unintended utility out of useful socially practices. It's an art because it requires engaging the user's motivation. Incentives (to benefit consumers by writing restaurant reviews) only work for a handful of users. For most, the byproduct of added value has to be in the exhaust -- and the act of participation should be enough in itself to motivate engagement. Users simply have to like using the tools -- for their own reasons (which are many indeed, but that's a whole different story).

Let's quickly take a look at this from a different angle -- social media marketing. Twitter offers the promise of mining and tracking conversations, if not participating in them, with an unprecedented degree of proximity, directness, and immediacy. Twitter search engines and meme trackers currently offer more breadth than hashtags for the simple reason that many more users simply type "movies" than type "#movies." But check "movies" on a site like summize (say you're a social media marketer), and results will include this: "Uncle. I can't work on this paper anymore. Let's go to the movies!." Use hashtags and you'll get better posts, though far fewer, because users have declared their topical selection of "movies." Intent is among the metrics measured by those in social analytics, and you can't get better than hashtags for that.

If only users could be asked to declare their intentions while conversing so that mining companies could extract the gold! No, it seems far more likely that the success stories and serendipitous moments ahead for web 2.0 will be found among those tools that can engineer social interactions such that the meta is an accurate but unintended byproduct of talk and engagement. (Beacon?) We'll have to watch this unfold and keep testing the frontiers. Either way, there's a lot to talk about.

Hashtags

Reputation, Conversational Index, Twitter, and Tweeterboard

I geeked out on tweeterboard.com last night and found myself getting lost in the conversation metrics the site displays in its box score tab, and which it presumably uses to calculate reputation scores. Their metric's not transparent to me, and if anyone has thoughts on how they calculate reputation, I'd love to hear from you. But I got to thinking about it, and so began mapping a few measurements of my own to see if they made sense.

In doing so, it quickly became apparent that "reputation" is in itself a fuzzy marker. And in the context of conversation and conversation analysis, especially.

For example, reputation speaks of the person, firstly. A person has a reputation. How is it earned? By their identity? By what they say? By who they know? And who knows them? By appearance, or by fact? By integrity, consistency, and other personal attributes. But also by their social status, their contributions, credibility, and effectiveness even.

In terms valuable to social media marketing, reputation might mean influence to some. Authority to others. Credibility and experience. Popularity and social capital. Participation and involvement. Also responsiveness and social value as a hub or connector.

Perhaps reputations are multiple -- reputation for something. For leadership, for success, for matchmaking, for consistency, for connectedness, for influence, for independence.

And if reputation is also to be used for something, that is, leveraged in womm viral campaigns, for example, consumers/users will offer value according to the type of reputation they have.

A social media marketer might want influence in some campaigns, might want to reach experts in another, or reach connectors/inviters for yet another. If the social marketer wanted campaign traction by pushing a branding campaign across the social graph, for example, his or her point of access and entry would suggest that s/he use influencers of a certain type. For popularizing, a user with a reputation for popularity. For credibility, a user with a reputation for integrity and expertise. For event promotion, a user with a reputation for being first to know and for inviting friends. And so on.

Individual influence varies according the communicability of their status in a social graph/social network. I have friends whose restaurant recommendations I would take no questions asked, others who can recommend films, music, or car repair. But they're all different people. Recommendations are personal, and so there's little knowing about a recommender without knowing about his or her relationships.

Which was why this exercise was so interesting: conversations captured on twitter at tweeterboard reveal several of the elements critical to reputation analysis. Granted that without semantic content analysis, they're only structural. Interesting nonetheless, however.

So now, to tweeterboard and this exercise in imagining reputation metrics. First off would be the conventional Friend and Follower count. Should be fine, but there are already potential issues here. (Note: by analogy to serp/seo/sem speak, friends = links; followers/followed should = link polarity.)

Number of followers : should indicate influence by means of popularity. However twitter users add friends as fast as Britney Spears loses them. Friends make a person look like somebody, are a friction-free connection (on twitter), and are a means to being found. In other words not a good enough indicator in and of itself.

Number following : should indicate enagement, and some amount of social context. You follow who you know, and who you find interesting. But here, too, the number is biased. It serves to enhance a user's appearance, and is not an declaration of either interest (level or kind) or attention (listeners are not always listening).


So then qualify influence by number of people with posting frequency (for participation level) and post volume (for engagement).

Number of posts: Post volume and frequency is the currency of measure on a conversation tool. Like money supply and velocity, posts are flow volume and rate of flow. Here again, there is an issue, for when it comes to reputation, all posts are equal but some posts are more equal than others. There are users who produce torrents of tweets, and who clearly enjoy twitter as a kind of group IM/chat. And others who post to make a point. And all points in between. Activity online is not all action, and communication online is often inactive communication (or communicative inaction -- a bug/feature that Facebook has raised to a cultural phenom with its activity, news, and friend feeds and status updates).

Communication becomes action, so say the linguists, when it takes the form of moves: statement - response. Talk is serial by nature, and so conversation usually involves a round of moves, or what we sometimes call "turn taking." The low rate of response and the improbability of responsiveness on a public or semi-public chat tool like twitter is a simple and direct byproduct and symptom of the technology's presence bracketing. Users don't know who's paying attention, not to mention who's listening. If talk were supposed to be a reciprocal exchange of linguistically embedded claims upon speaker and listener leading to understanding, agreement or even consensus, twitter would not be our first choice of talk format!

But that's what makes it so compelling -- clearly "conversation" doesn't even begin to describe what twitter is or does. Social media are about new forms of talk (and new forms of presence). I'm preaching to the choir -- we all get this.

Onward, to more of what Tweeterboard must presumably fold into its fluffy mix of conversational dough (read: currency ;-) ).

The spread: Now this one is fascinating. High spread numbers (e.g. between two twitter users, number posts to @recipient vs number posts received from recipient to @sender) indicate asymmetry. Meaning that these users don't like each other equally? No way to know that, so how about these one user wants more from the other? A negative spread shows that the user sending messages isn't getting equal number of replies. The issue here is that we can't measure the relationship by sent/replied because twitter is imperfect. @name messages may go unheeded because they're missed -- that simple. Message delivery is imperfect on twitter because so many users prefer to @name in public (for valid social reasons, mostly) than direct message (even tho the latter offers a higher delivery guarantee). Posting @name in public accrues visibility and social capital to the sender, not to mention findability. Same for positive spreads.

So perhaps the thing to measure in the spread is the degree of spread (I've seen 0:50). Or the range of spreads in the aggregate. Then a user who has a tight and narrow range of spreads would be a responsive user, an attentive user. A wide and wild range of spreads would be an inconsistent, unresponsive user. This is plausible, tho spam posts would screw this one up and require yet another round of filters (If I receive spam posts I don't want to lose reputation points just because I've not replied to them).

Then there's the difference between @name posts and @name citations. When a tweet begins with @name, it's usually for @name. But if @name is cited within a post, it's possible that the message expresses thanks, recognition, or is a citation, promotion, or other form of social referencing and distribution. I wouldn't have a clue if tweeterboard makes the distinction. The high degree of @name citations on twitter would suggest it that these uses could be used to build soft (tacit) social graphs. (Interesting thought: a Milieu Metric).

Some, and often highly influential twitter users, also show a large number of orphaned post exchanges. These show up as 0:1 or 1:0, and are indicated in the box score as 1 or -1. A very large number of 1's might indicate that other twitterers want to be in this user's audience and circle. But again, it might simply mean the user missed the @name message. Hard to know intent, but absolute number of 1's/-1's would seem to suggest visibility and social capital.

Getting creative, here are few other possibilities that spring to this (now tired) mind.


@name cited (but never sent to @name : this might indicate rubbing elbows, or wanting to appear in the company of @name. Benefit to user posting but not directly communicating to @name would be apparent social capital (what I like to call social media's proclivity not just for appearance but also "apparancy").

@recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @recipient_name citations : this might indicate a tight social clique of users attentive to each other. @name messages get the attention of others and solicit uptake. For example "congrats to @name for whatever" leads to a round of "yeah congrats @name!". Could be used by marketers to suss out active trust circles.
ditto for: @recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @recipient_name replies

@recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @sender_name replies : would raise the former to the level of friendship, e.g. from clique to group. Because in this version the reply is more than a citation, it's reply. Attention is paid not just to the @name cited but to the @sender who posted the citation. Could be used by marketers to suss out active conversationalists.

@recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @sender_name citations : is somewhat uncommon, but responding to the poster not just the post is a sign of friendly attention and might be a metric of social presence. This is a "great to see you" moment and proffers a measure of relational density. Unless the message is nasty and mean, it's a sign of friendship, for the users are acknowledging each other (from "i follow you to I see you," or to quote Genesis, "Follow you, follow me"; every look wants a look back, and online "I see you" must be stated explicitly, so it's always *already* "I see you and therefore I want to see you seeing me" -- and on twitter, if this is in front of others, all the better!)

Ok, enough for now. I came up with more but you'll have to hire me. (just kidding.)

Damn I love twitter.

gratitude and respect goes to Stowe Boyd for pushing the conversational index long ago, and for reflections on twitter and the flow

Twitter for social marketing? Tweetvolume, Summize, and the Holy Grail

Checking out some of the innumerable twitter third party apps with an eye to the use of twitter in marketing and branding. If the social media marketers have it right, twitter ought to be an ideal social marketing tool. It's a street-level conversation tool, it's authentic and is used (still) by users for users. Unpolluted so far by commercial messaging, it ought to offer the promise of direct engagement with consumer audiences.

I'm still unsure of how close marketers can get to everyday talk without the serious risk of losing face and credibility. My gut tells me that there's a cultural wall (to wit, Beacon's Faceplant?) or threshold beyond which marketers and advertisers hoping to feed on the Feed risk losing face for their overzealousness.

Branding and marketing campaigns want to preserve some control over their message -- that's only natural. Facebook members want to determine their appearance, too. But the awe inspired in marketing departments at the occasional viral success story still shines, like a beacon of hope, and the grail they seek is none other than the same enlightened redemption any good capitalist dreams of when the light strikes just right.

Can one quest for the grail if it means heralding the masses towards a destination already known? Or is the grail a serendipitous discovery that awaits only those leaders willing to be swept up in the giddy abandon of a gathering mob? Is the allegory I'm reaching for Monty Python or Full Monty? The marketer who leads his people to the grail risks being discovered as the Emperor with no clothes. The marketer who is misled by his people, too, may wind up disrobed before his audience.

If the consumer who feels she can trust a brand as she trusts the naked truth, that is, she's in conversation with a brand and the brand is in conversation with her, then there would be truth in advertising. And that would be a leap (of faith?!).

It strikes me that social media marketing and advertising want to be in "the flow," but from what I have seen of the social media release so far, participation in social media is not yet truly conversational. Twitter would be used for social media releases, for PR, in other words for a form of public "direct" messaging. In the hopes that it is picked up womm-style and passed around at street level.

But twitter and other talk tools are conversational, and there might be fundamental constraints on how easily a non-conversational participant (brand) achieves success if it remains only the author of its messages. Sure, twitter is a faster flow, but it's also a slow chat. And conversations cannot be controlled.

As you can see from the results on TweetVolume comparing Nike, Reebok, Adidas, and Puma, Nike is the clear winner.

A quick comparison of posts on Summize mentioning Nike, Reebok, or Adidas, however, shows more negative twitter commentary on Nike about its labor practices, more earnest complimentary tweets about Reebok, and more fan tweets about Adidas.

What would the social media marketer to get an accurate view of buzz on twitter for his or her brand? At this point, read and click. Sentiment analysis would be tough on twitter because the messages are so short. Conversations would be hard to find because messages and replies are loosely coupled at best, and the density of coupled statements-responses (which would indicate conversational durability) is extremely low on twitter. One could find influencers using current metrics, but to date influencers are measured by activity more than by content or domain expertise -- so finding a mover and shaker in sneakers would require head-banging queries at a minimum.

Anecdotal signs of throughput and pickup for social media marketers, however, could be gleaned from twitter and used to supplement other forms of audience survey, polls, and online market research.

It strikes me, again, that the market for good social analytical tools would be huge. That is, if social media marketing doesn't mind a wee bit of truth.

Related twitter tools and sites:

Twitterverse A cloud view of talk on twitter
Tweetscan Like Summize.com, twitter search

Directions for research, theory, and a general update

I've been off blogging it seems for quite a while, and while I feel out of the loop in some respects as a result, it's been healthy and productive for a number of reasons. That said, I'm going to try to resume short post blogging as a means of thinking out loud, and sharing my plans for research and conceptual work in the year ahead.

When I took time off blogging I got caught up in Twittering and Facebooking instead. I like to immerse myself in new applications to get to know them from the inside, and last summer and fall I managed to build a new conceptual, and much more psychological system of analysis, by means of using tools and observing my own and others' use at the same time. I have to admit that for weeks at a time I lost myself in a variety of user and personality positions, and managed to go deep into a number of different use cases, modalities, "personas" or personalities, user motives and intentions. I couldn't do that and blog at the same time, for to adopt and play out a user position while reporting it publicly just wasn't possible. I took scores of pages of notes and over December and January wrote up what is now another social interaction design tome, this one on the psychology of the user experience in social media.

While also doing client work for several startups and social media companies, I've been researching the industry and state of theory, user psychology, media theory, and social network analysis and metrics, for the past month. It's now time to integrate my own theory development with current practices — a project that will probably take me through spring.

I made a decision, after becoming senior fellow at SNCR, to also focus some on purposeful social media — networks and communities, and social media marketing, for social good and global change. My own social media fatigue has left me hankering for evidence and best practices of social media used to promote real and offline transformations. The "pure forms" of social networking (profile-based friend and socializing sites) have run their course for me, I think. That said, I've noticed an increase in calls to participate in professional community designs and thematic social networking in non consumer-oriented markets — a sign that even if consulting opportunities in viral verticals drops off, interest in the utility of social networking among communities of practice is growing.

MySpace and Facebook continue to spark compelling opportunities in markets and among brands/companies that see the potential in cementing latent communities. So even if time has run short for companies seeking success in social netorking for movies, music, pets, and so on and so forth, there seems to be a growing sense that more structured and thematically-contained sites have a future worth exploring. Even if facebookers are rapidly uninstalling social apps, and users are consolidating their network memberships down to the few that offer real social utility.

A few points then, for those interested in what I've been up to during these last quiet few months, on the areas I've been digging into:

• A set of psychological profiles and definitions of user types loosely based on self psychology, communication styles, and pathologies that defines up to 15 user types by their interaction and communication competencies and inclinations. Roughly and simply, these user types contrast with those more commonly used to characterize influence and brand advocates, or mavens/connectors (models we see referred to frequently). I've instead sought to design a set of personalities around the user's encounter with the medium and his/her self presentation, communication, and interaction styles. It's a complicated model but is based on: the user's sense of self and sense of the other (audience); the user's interest in the medium itself; and the user's tendencies and communication styles as they pertain to interacting with others online. I see the user as having a self image; a sense of how s/he appears to others; a tendency to become involved in a social application and activity (call these their interests in being online); and a personality-based cluster of habits and tendencies to read, interpret, and become engaged through mediated communication that correspond to the individual's characteristic handling of ambiguities of intent, motive, sincerity, truth, and so on. I know, it seems complicated, but my model is tailored to online communication; most others are not. I view the screen as alternately a mirror, a surface, or a lens/window. This has helped me develop models for interaction that ground user engagement either in themselves, and self image, or in the content/interaction published to the screen, or in communication with the other. I'll wrap this up by spring and post as a white paper. This one should round out my social interaction design work (previous papers addressed culture/community and epiphenomena of social practices; and the architecture of screen and interaction design and its role in organizing and structuring of social interactions and communication).
• Social media marketing and the potential for commercial messaging in everyday social media practices. Clearly we're only at the beginning of what could emerge as a burgeoning industry, and possibly the next phase of web marketing. Not banners (phase 1), not contextual ads (phase 2), and not search engine advertising (phase 3), but activity, news, and friend feed product placement and social practice-embedded advertising and marketing. I was preparing a presentation on the challenges of feed-based advertising when Beacon up and flopped, and have tabled this work for the time being. Though I personally believe that social (graph) marketing, not one-to-one relationship marketing, is the Holy Grail for commercial market, product, brand, and event promotions of the future. This is a tasty field for its linguistic, trust, and relationship issues alone, not to mention the more and currently conventional issues of social graph analysis, "influence" analysis, semantic, and sentiment analysis. 
• In close relation to my research into social media marketing, I've mapped out a blueprint for social media analytics that accounts not only for relational attributes (the social graph), but also content (which is notoriously difficult) and intention (also difficult) and which is based on an understanding of the user engagement as measured by onscreen actions, longitudinally tracked, and matched to the psychological profiles I mentioned above (since all button clicks are not equal). I'm fascinated by the possibilities for social media analytics, and while user agency is extremely difficult to interpret online, especially because we can only capture "positive" actions and have no purchase on "negative" choices (there's no tracking of "not clicking"), an analytics is necessary if social media marketing is to achieve accuracy in reporting and campaign management. This work, too, is tabled at the moment.
• I've been hunting down all the research I can possibly find on the impact of social media on mass media, and on the value of social media in topical conversation and cultural discourses of climate change. I think I wanted to know if social media can help save the world. This research is extremely difficult to conduct. There's no semantic tool out there that can scrape and measure the topical content and map the discursive practices on, say, Facebook or Myspace. After browsing and using a number of social change/green marketing and environmentally-oriented social action, activism, and discussion communities, I've not been able to figure out how to conduct rigorous research or analysis of either their impact in motivating other users, changing behaviors, or augmenting news and coverage of climate and green topics and themes. There's simply too much noise in social posts (posts to communities that get attention, or are biographical, or are too short, or are simply spam/junk). There is anecdotal evidence that mass media is informed by and assimilates the blogosphere, citizen journalism, youtube, and other social media contents — but it's anecdotal. Were one to attempt to show that social media can help change the world, I'm afraid it simply couldn't be done. Too much user participation has the intention of producing presence and self identity, of attracting friends, or of distributing user presence across groups and communities that it's simply not possible for us to know that a user means what s/he says, or says what s/he means (feels, cares about). And as participation rates increase on social networking sites, so too does noise and the meta-communicative byproducts that result from user behaviors and participation that seek attention, popularity, like-ability, and so on. That said, and not to toss a wet blanket on what clearly concerns an awful lot of people, stuff is happening, and the social web is clearly a player in producing discourse, reflection, critique, coordination, as well as green branding and marketing. I just can't see how to measure it.
• Lastly, I'm continue to take and keep notes on social applications, widgets, and all manner of social interaction and communication systems useful for the direct and intended purpose of a specific user experience, or indirectly for the production of practices and pastimes. A social interaction designer needs to know what works — whether it was meant for what it does or not! I still believe that social software is functional when as software it is dysfunctional. And for this, as a software development practice, social networking tools and applications are still an interesting domain. But man, are there a lot of silly apps on facebook... Somebody else is going to have to use them all! 

Well, that's my update. I'm working on what research I can conduct, hoping that it will validate my psychological profiles and cement my blueprint for social analytics at the same time. I may have to give up, for the time being, the idea that a "MyChange" can save the world. And instead focus on the use of niche networks to realize community potential and produce practitioner knowledge and relationships. That's what a gigger does to get the gigs. 

But if you have an opportunity, and the resources, with which to do something really big, don't hesitate to call!

New slideshows on social media and social interaction design

I've posted a couple new slideshow presentations to my site here and to slideshare. This time I threw in some graphics and I've attempted to be as economic with prose as possible! I have one on the conversation dynamics of Yelp.com, and more theoretical one on the Psychology of Users of social media. I'll soon post one on user competencies with social media, and then one on the disruption of markets in which the social web has influence.

Slideshows on Gravity7, downloadable as pdf, powerpoint, and Apple's keynote

Slideshows on Slideshare.net

Comments and feedback are welcome!

Social technology's transparency among teens

It's no surprise that many of today's youths exercise a their social skills through social media technologies. They've got a kind of socio-technical competence that would make many of us look like complete hacks. That's interesting to me. What happens to a person's competence in face to face interactions if she or he spends a great deal of time in mediated interactions? If, as a recent study claims, these technologies are truly transparent (a software designer's dream!), is their absence in face to face encounters noticeable? Are teens more likely to be shy in real life?

It's much easier to control one's own face if it's not in front of somebody else. We can hide behind our emotions if there's a screen to represent them instead. Flirtatious gestures, suggestive comments, messages, emoticons, jokes, and so on present the personal with the technical help of what amounts to a technical communication system. Codes, idioms, genres, forms of writing, posting, commenting and so on remove affect and flatten out differences, rendering communication somewhat less communicative...

It would be interesting to know if a new generation is becoming more shy in face to face situations.

And this is truly just hypothesizing out loud.. Is it possible that if the demands of getting through face to face encounters with successs, being and feeling liked and recognized while making others comfortable during some shared facetime -- without recourse to the screen and the imaginary sense of remote control that it can bestow upon its users -- is it possible that a reliance on technical mediation of the social could produce real symptoms?

Just as parents shrink at the communicative risks and unknowns, the faux pas that might lurk behind every dialog box and mouseclick... Would a dependence on the props of social media be seen and heard in conversation malaprops and stagefright?

If so, what a sad thing it would be. We get to know each other best in person.



Excerpts from The virtual generation by Jo Chandler, August 14, 2007


"As a new global survey of 18,000 youths commissioned by MTV and MSN has found, while today's youth are engrossed in a constant conversation, almost 40 per cent do not even notice the technology that enables it. This is despite a similar number saying that checking their mobiles is the first and last task of every day; two-thirds of them saying that checking who is online is their first priority whenever they boot up; and all of them using email or instant messaging every time they log in. They have skills that would have classified them as computer nerds a decade ago, but they don't regard themselves as technophiles. This is just their country."
....

"For girls, it is mostly about the social networks, with the music and tricks an add-on. For the boys it is the opposite. They enjoy the process of creating and sharing music and imagery and jokes - hence their love of YouTube; playing virtual games and invisible wars; breaking codes and deciphering clues to allow them to better understand and manipulate the technology."

....

"AS TEENAGERS' virtual networks expand, their real worlds contract. "We put more and more money into pastoral care, into communicating with each other, but when it comes to communicating face to face, we are poorer than we have ever been," says Shelford principal Pam Chessell.

....

She says the task of 15-year-olds is to begin to find and define themselves. But "teenagers are so immersed in their fabricated virtual identities that these become real to them"."

....

"They get bored so quickly. They need this gadgetry. They need to keep the balance of books and technology."

Twitter vs Facebook status feeds

Twitter was conceived as a status updater copasetic with sms. Ironically though, it's become a personal broadcast service, while facebook's status updates read like true updates.

We write to an audience, in this case twitter followers or facebook friends. Here facebook has the advantage in that we can take our audience for granted, whereas on twitter our sense of the audience generally diffuse.

Twitter does produce those brief conversational runs -- an effect of the tool's strange manner of creating presence.

Twitter posts are more likely to be conversation starters. and are more talkative. They often invite acknowledgment if not response.

Facebook status updates tend to be tales and statements, told in a non-conversational tone and for the purpose of getting on the radar.

Twitter can be more addictive for the reason that we might itch to check it -- for replies or news. It's more psychological.

Facebook's feed is more of a social utility, and it seems less psychological (there are pokes, walls, and apps for that).

I'm back to blogging. Took a break in order to focus on a couple new social interaction design white papers and to work on some company ideas.

Social Media: It's all Talk

Getting the talk right on social media sites is essential to success. And the range of tools and post types (blog, comment, discuss, video, etc) and messaging types available on social software sites has never been greater. Social media sites are "talk systems," built to facilitate and encourage talk among members. Each is designed to structure talk among users *about* a theme or topic.

On MySpace.com, we engage in a kind of social conversation centered on our interests, friends, activities and so on. The topic on MySpace is us. We are the subject of talk, and in talking to our friends on MySpace we're still talking about ourselves, really. What we talk about maintains our relationships with friends. The talk on MySpace is autobiographical.

On Yelp.com we talk about restaurants, bars, places we visit and like. But while we talk about our favorite coffee shops and hangouts, we're telling about ourselves. We're revealing what *we* are like by revealing *what* we like. Yelp is not built around social networking but of course creates thin social networks by making it easy to find people who like things that we like. Yelp, like MySpace, involves a high degree of personal disclosure; only it's captured through reviews of something else. The talk on Yelp is topical.

LinkedIn.com, which used to engage members in direct communication (contacting, making or getting introduced directly to members), now offers LinkedIn Answers. Unlike the direct communication that passed among members without creating visible talk on the site, Answers now allows members to demonstrate their expertise in front of the LinkedIn audience/community. By asking questions or providing answers, members not only draw attention to themselves—they reveal what they are interested in currently, or what they know something about, as well as how they approach it. Members are able to reveal the depth of their expertise and disclose some of their personality in ways that eluded the resume/bio that structures member profiles on Linkedin. The talk in Answers is autobiographical.

There are three central challenges to any social software site. Organizing what members talk about, and to whom, and why. And to solve each, we need only think about what we do in everyday talk. We talk to people we enjoy talking to. We talk about ourselves to attract interest and because we simply need to. We talk about what we like to disclose our interests. We talk about why we like it, or do it, or find it interesting in order to flesh out character, our motivations and goals. We talk about it in ways that disclose our passions, our curiosities, and our fears and trepidations. We reveal our competencies and expertise in how we talk: by proclaiming, declaring, challenging, making references, and so on. We create credibility in how we talk about things. We project authority also, in what we say and how we say it. We solicit advice, allegiance and respect in how we talk, and to whom we talk.

If talk is what social software organizes, we get engaged either by *talking to or at* other members, or by *telling* about ourselves. Blogs are well-suited to telling. We tell our readers (and ourselves) what we think. Blogging is highly self-reflective and self-referential. Sitting and writing a blog post is not about interaction but is a form of speech nonetheless. I'm doing it right now. Commenting is directed at a person or his/her contribution, so it's much more a kind of talk. It's direct because it is a response to somebody; but it's public also. Either the person commented on or somebody else in the audience may respond with a further comment. Tagging, digging, hot-listing and so on are all very small forms of talk, insofar as they are topical (to digg is to affirm a piece of content, in short, to "agree" with it or "like" it). These are small gestures of affirmation, agreement, preference, interest, and so on. The genius in keeping these simple is to create some amount of ambiguity.

All talk is ambiguous, there's no knowing with any certainty what another person is truly thinking. Social software not only thrives on our human interest and tolerance for ambiguity, it generates *extra* ambiguity to keep things going. Gestural forms of talk, such as the many icons and actions offered on sites for sending a wink, compliment, thumbs up, kudo, etc. are each a non-verbal expression built entirely around the ambiguity of communicating through cliche: the recipient knows what "it" means but not what "I" mean...

Flirting and dating underlie any healthy social media site. What makes elevators such a pregnant encounter is exactly what works for social media. Though it's impolite to talk in an elevator, it's equally impolite to acknowledge people in close proximity. The elevator ride can create tension or discomfort so easily because it places its riders in a double bind: don't ignore them, but don't talk to them, and don't show more interest than would be appropriate, even though the longer this elevator ride is, the more you have to "contain" yourself in front of others that by this time you really ought to be acknowledging more substantially! Thought experiment: how many floors would it take before its riders simply had to start talking? (We'll leave Aerosmith out of this ride!)

Social media are like the opposite of an elevator ride: people dispersed all over the place, able to talk or communicate but having little to go on and no sense of how involved others are, or for how long, or why. Talking is the only way through those ambiguities. But getting people to talk, about themselves as well as about topical interests, to others on the site, and capturing, storing, organizing and presenting what they talk about is the challenge of social interaction design. There are many ways to motivate talk. It can be anchored on attention getting; on autobiographical disclosure; on demonstrating expertise; on creating affinities; on producing attitudes (YouTube excels at generating attitudes and dispositions); and so on. But the biggest mistake social software site owners make is thinking that users want to talk about them, their service, or what they have built. We build for talk, and must hand it over when we're done so that our users can talk about themselves with others. To expect them to talk about what we've made for them, or even to ask them to talk about what we find interesting, won't work at all.

Related: I cover this in depth in a recent white paper on Review sites (Yelp.com), as well as in other white papers and in reading notes on my site.



Technorati tags: blogging, design, media, interaction design, social interaction design, social media, social networks, social software, sociology, theory, tagging, user generated, web 2.0, web

Getting into social video

I've been poking about the social video space of late and absorbing as many moving pixels as can be safely beamed at a pair of analog eye sockets without producing tissue damage, seizures, or abnormalities of the brain. It's an interesting space less for what companies are doing than for what it suggests they might do, but the signs are there. In terms of content, well I'm inspired to yank a line out of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing... "eyes glazed insanely behind tiny gold-rimmed greaser shades, screaming gibberish." That's Hunter at a traffic light in a state of mind. But it seems to apply to the cumulative experience of watching short video clips online at social video sites.

I've said before that I think YouTube is a social system in failure mode. That in a way, the video is a substitute for the blog post, presenting something about its poster that's neither expository nor opinion, but is in some way reveals the poster's personality and taste. That the video is in a way an "utterance." That's the only way it makes sense to think of YouTube as a talk system (to me, at least). But I really do think that's what makes it interesting. Short videos can function as a kind of sign system, or symbolic language perhaps. They're identifying, moreso than Flickr pics for example, because they use content as a reference. In the case of videos shot of the person posting, and by the person posting, they're obviously even more of an "utterance." Where blogging requires a person to say something interesting, the video says it for us. It's faster, its more easily consumed (perhaps), it's often more easily liked, and as a "linguistic" phrase it is is easily accepted. (How would you reject a person on the basis of their videos?)

If YouTube is social because it creates visibility for posters and involves a communication system in which videos are member contributions, statements or messages through which members identify themselves, then the similarities among different kinds of videos provide a quick route to group identities... The social on YouTube can then differentiate itself: videos have styles, contents, references, and so on. The popularity of comedy, music videos, and TV shows us that YouTube samples popular culture, and that members identify themselves through pop culture clips. We speak TV on YouTube.

What comes next then is where things will get interesting. As video players become richer, and as they embed chat, commenting, rating, lists, and forms of gestural communication and action within themselves (Joost, Click.tv, Clipsync are a few in this space; Jumpcut as an editor system, is communicative but not in the way I'm thinking about at the moment), the challenges of communicating through video, about video, and to other viewers (friends or anonymous) quickly complicates the user experience.

What social practices await us on the other side of video clips, channels, ratings, tags, and lists? Will we use our camphones to create group videos that we then annotate for group memories and video scrapbooks? Will we finally see what really happens in Vegas? Will we send each other video postcards? Will dating profiles link to clips of our stupid human tricks on YouTube? Or will new video intimacies and confessionals provide us with a much richer view of each other (Is that what we even want? Most online daters prefer to pique curiosity by telling about themselves in text form; video is too revealing, and is a direct and less-flattering way to present ourselves than the text profile, over which we have much more control!) What kinds of games will we play with each other through video?

Will social marketers be able to extract good preference data from our social video use? How will we solve the challenges of getting meta data from chats (which are notoriously poor at revealing what it is they are about, given as they are to directing attention among chatters, not what is chatted about)? Will users get together for synchronous video viewing, or does that just fly in the face of the time-shifting benefits of the medium in the first place? How will live social video allow members to manage their presence availability (as any IM tool does today)? How deeply can we become engaged in video content, and between typing, talking, pressing buttons, and turning on our own webcams, which mode or combination will win?

Interesting developments are certainly just around the corner. I would like to think that this time, the moving image might realize some of its educational potential (TV was hailed for its potential in democratizing and distributing knowledge -- think Marshall McLuhan or Ed Murrow in Goodnight and Good Luck). If content is king, the king this time is us.

Technorati tags: design, media, social interaction design, social media, social software, social video, sociology, user generated, Youtube

I can see (myself) for miles and miles and....

I don't normally write personal posts. But last night, during one of those proverbial late-night-staring-at-the-ceiling attempts to sweep the cobwebs from the corners of my mind in order to prepare it for rest, I had what felt like a small-to-middling realization. I remembered realizing, out on the playa one night at Burning Man, that I'd lived all my life unable to tell the difference between anger and resentment. Coming from others, I mean. That when a person was angry with my I immediately thought they resented me. What mattered of course was how this affect my response.
I realized last night, thinking about this project to define the "user" of social software as a user in conversation with him/herself as much as with "real" others, realized that there are some emotions that are easily mistaken online. Really big, important emotions. Though they're not really emotions; they're aspects of communication that involve emotion. But it's precisely because they're not expressed, they're read, that they are easily confused. Empathy and projection. A person might be empathetic or sympathetic, compassionate, in an email, or post, or comment. That would be our reading, our impression. But the person being compassionate might be projecting. Transactional Analysts described these kinds of phenomena as "crossed transactions."
For example: Bossman: Mary, get me a hundred copies of this report by lunch please. Mary: You don't own me you know! I do have other things to do! (They were a bit less PC back then; but you probably recognize the dynamic. Think of Chloe in 24). TA would have called this an adult-child transaction, wherein Mary responds as a child to a demanding parent.
So the thing that hit me was that there are certain kinds of communications, affective or emotionally rich ones, that are handled in face to face talk by use of body language, face, and of course the fact within seconds we can establish, by walking up or down the ladder of intensity and risk, each other's intentions. But in blogging, commenting, emailing, (less so in IM -- because it cycles through short turns and is actually connected to another person), we are required to read/interpret the intention behind what others say. And so we can read them generously, that is assigning to their words what seem to be their intentions. Or we can read them internally, that is through our own emotional complexes, including of course all the things we tend to hear because we're sensitive to them.
Some of the most important aspects of communication, those having to do with interest, with liking a person, with being acknowledged, ignored, agreed with or disagreed with, are essentially up for grabs. If we have emotional cobwebs and detritus, and I don't know a soul who doesn't, we recognize/encounter our own crap in other's words, and assign it to them (unless we're enlightened, in which case we can catch ourselves before answering!). Same with ideals, fantasies, wishes, etc: we might believe they mean it (when in fact *they're* engaged perhaps with their own idealizations). This would explain the tendency in dating sites for people to ascend the ramp to intimacy at great speed, only to then fall from the peak disastrously and walk away in great disappointment. The medium engages us with our own means of understanding another's intentions, but brackets their ability to correct where our heading.

The User Experience of Review Writing

Another excerpt from the forthcoming white paper on Review Sites...

Review Writing
The inner experience of writing a review involves a large number of things, and without going into any in depth, we need to acknowledge at least several of them. There is the thing reviewed. There is whom it is written for—this might be "yelpers" or "anyone" or "mommydaddy" or "friend," "stalker," "business owner," "the Almighty," or "the cute Yelper who just requested my friendship." There is the style of writing, which might hew close to the utility of reviewing or stray off into personal ramblings, flashes of wit, hooks and lines designed to get attention, and so on. There is the use of qualifying observations by which a reader can glean, for him or herself and not because the author has said so, the salient selling points of the thing reviewed. There is then, as just mentioned, the recommendation or advice given within the recommendation, which itself can vary among all shades of "should," "perhaps" "tentatively" "confidently" "ought" "must" and "not." There is the revealing of the depth and scope of one's authority on the matter, or not, or lack of it (which is not the same as not revealing, it's a matter of not admitting!). There is the difference between being the first to review, in which case the review may inform subsequent reviewers, because a review can easily be a response to a review, to reviews in a series, or to reviews overall, depending on where the author puts him or herself in his/her emotional/mental relation to the whole proceeding. There is the review as comment to, or commentary on; and in commenting to, one might address reviewers, commentors, their reviews or their comments, though it may be hard for the reader to tell which is which.

The experience of writing a review is in fact complex indeed, and that's not including the potential for misspellings, errors in fact, misinformed or inaccurately attributed perspectives and observations. Nor is it including the post window, tags, and now the addition of icons that can be used to represent a gestural remark, which again may indicate to some a reflection on the review, or the reviewer, and it can be hard to tell which is which since we can't ask the person who selected them. And none of this includes the context of the review, which is to say some reviewers choose a time of day, or a category, an oft-reviewed Thing, trend, or bit of news as a means of attracting more attention (to themselves, their review, the view of themselves as manifest in the review, or perhaps to others. Or the Thing, even!). And again, none of this addresses the site in which the review is posted, its "branding" and community, and the sense that each user may have of what those are, how it serves them, or whom is served, and so on and so forth. The production of a review, as we see, is not so simple as the posting window would have it. From the perspective of social interaction design, at least.

Technorati tags: blogging, interaction design, social interaction design, social media, social networks, social software, sociology, theory, reviews, user generated, web 2.0, web,
Yelp

The Opacity of Users in Transparent Technologies

Social software and social media sites present an interesting challenge to those of us interested in the user experience. Where the user experience in "conventional" software can be examined according to assumptions we (know how to) make about the user's goals, needs, and objectives, when it comes to social media we have to think outside the proverbial box.

The conventional view taken up in the world of software draws a straight and unbroken line from the user to the software application. The user's agency is goal-directed, values success and effectiveness, and engaged in needs-oriented activity (e.g. transferring funds online). But in social software sites, the user uses the "software" to engage with other users.

The user's activity is an encounter with the world of meanings produced by other users participating in some form of organized, structured, formal or informal "interaction." At times the user simply reads the contributions of others. At times s/he communicates with those others. At times s/he is in a self-reflective mode, aware of how things reflect on him/herself. At times s/he becomes immersed in an online encounter and is taken up with it.

Each of these variations--and I've sketched only a handful--involves a complex set of relationships, real and possible, among known or familiar, present or absent, individual, group, or collective, identified or anonymous participants. Investigating this matrix creates immense and radical challenges to UI, UX, and interaction designers. Psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology each suggest theoretical approaches worth considering. But few of them can accommodate the medium, the technology itself, without upsetting some of the fundamental positions from which they are argued.

The intervention of a communication and publishing medium and the substitution of interaction tools functioning asynchronously --often through text, image, and sometimes video, but always involving a representation of the user's presence--requires us to think differently about what users are up to when they head online. These technologies shift ourselves away from ourselves, giving us a screen on which are painted words, statements, links, lists, pictures and whatnot, in place the other (person) him or herself.

If we are to make progress on the user psychology and relation to his experience of social media, we need to accept the basic fact that the "social" in social media is optimistic, perhaps deceptively so. Sure, we encounter others online. We "talk" to them through our blogs and comments. We "collaborate" with them, sharing files, bookmarking and tagging sites, creating photo sets, group blogs, and more. But communication that is mediated neither unfolds like it does when it is face to face--when people take an interest in each other as well as a shared social encounter--nor does interaction move through the rhythms, speeds, or intensities of activity that are possible in a live situation.

A new set of relations is emerging. They are not the obvious ones, those we've described until now as organizing activity on social media sites like those that serve dating, career networking, learning, socializing, buying/selling or other themed social practices. This new set involves the self to him or herself. It engages psychological factors like projection, introjection, transference, internalization, externalization, and so on.

It involves relations of number, from the couple to the triad/triangle, to clans, tribes, groups, crowds, and audiences. It might engage in the shifting and circulating economy of attention, of debts and gifts, governed by etiquette or set in a chaotic classroom melee. It can compel a user to an insight of self-realization, or develop into a fascination with an other (user). It might be organized or informed by acts of communication, suggestion, flirtation, admiration, appreciation, and these might become known through blog posts, emails, comments, discussions, messages or other gestural substitutes such as those offered as icons at many social software sites. And there are many more possibilities.

But they all engage a relation of self with self, and involve an impression of the other that is founded on the other's own attempt to present/express him or herself. All of this culminates in an enormously-varied experience of developing awareness of the other and of oneself at the same time, sometimes as a reflection off the other, sometimes as a projection of one's interpretation of the other. Interpretation and projection, substitution and displacement, talk as conversation and as its short-form exchanges--all unfold on a ribbon of time itself unreeling through discontinuities, fragments, segments, chains, and aborted episodes that do not come together so much as occur concurrently.

The social world online is a hall of mirrors in which it's hard to hold an image standing still, let alone in motion. More on this in the next few weeks.


Technorati tags: blogging, design, media, interaction design, social interaction design, social media, social networks, social software, sociology, theory, tagging, user generated, web 2.0, web

Here's talking at you, kid... It's all talk on social media

"Of all the gin joints in all the world, you have to come into this one..." Ever get that feeling that there's a whole lot more talk going on here than there is listening? That perhaps the medium itself is biased? That the writing medium only captures statements and utterances, posts. It only captures us when we talk. It doesnt capture us when we don't talk. And because the screen here can only show what its design is capable of seeing, nothing exists that is not added to it. And we know that. The web's speed has increased these days to such a velocity that it's become impossible to think without having to communicate about it (as i'm doing now, if just to make a point).

I'm reminded of the Fawlty Towers Germans episode in which Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), in the middle of hanging a moose head on the hotel lobby wall, has to climb down from a stool to answer the phone, at the other end of which is his hospitalized wife, calling to ask if he has hung the moose head. And his response, something along the lines of "I'm doing it! I was just... I mean, what is the point you stupid bint? I was just busy doing it and then i have to stop doing it to pick up the phone to tell you that i was in the middle of doing it?! I mean is there anything esle I can do for you? Move the hotel a couple feet to the left?'

There are of course many ways of talking. But this mode, which is for the most part "talking to oneself", produces a strange conversational effect when it involves attaching comments to others' posts, responding to comments in posts, posting on posts, and so on. I wonder whether we'll recognize each other, some day (and I hope far away). We'll recognize ourselves, of that I'm sure. But will anyone else? Well there'll be gin joints to stop into. And some day, some where, in some far off gin joint along the norther coast of Morocco, in a town known as Casablanca, somebody will say "here's talking at you kid" and perhaps there'll be nothing wrong with it...

New Social Software Design White Paper

White Paper: Social Interaction Design Guide: Social Media, Social Practices, Social Content 76 pages. by Adrian Chan


I've had to take a break from social media blogging lately to work on a few white papers and reading notes. There's only so much you can do in a short form blog post!

In this recent white paper I take the idea of socio-technical competence seriously. Social theorists wouldn't conventionally associate technical competencies with matters of social interaction, communication, and so on. Technologies are supposed to be props, objects, things; and as such, not essential to social encounters.

But when the communication runs through a technology, when it's a matter of user-device-user interaction, then the medium's role comes into play in a big way. So this white paper takes a look at how social media and social software sites are designed. I assume that users and visitors are able to tell when the contents of a page reflect social interaction. We might even argue that it's this kind of competence with online media that has made Web 2.0 possible. (If you believe that the social and cultural conditions need to be prepared, or grown, before people can see the value in new technologies, and realize them). I assume that users understand that the etiquette on a dating site is different from the etiquette on a career networking site. I assume that youths are clear about the self-reflective use of testimonials published on their friends' pages (what they write says something about them). And so on, with further assumptions.

Social interaction design suggests that the architecture, functioning and features, the use of screen real estate, the particular presence of people (faces, profiles), or general suggestion of audience presence (as on amazon, imdb), the organization of content by tags, that all these design decisions are social, not technical in nature. If you have built a television and nobody's watching, you don't fix it by adding buttons to the remote control. It's the same with the design of social media. We're now very clearly in a paradigm shift that is likely to reverse the roles, disrupt the talent pools, redraw the territories, and fundamentally change the mode of consumption and attention given to social and mass media. This shift affects software and technology design and content production and programming (network TV, cable, movies, radio, etc.) equally.

When media are social, the need for high production value diminishes because other people grab the user/viewer's attention instead. The possibility that anything posted online might solicit a response transforms content from its form as an object to its potential use in a round of communication or talk. I still believe that all social media are talk systems, including Youtube (in which the "utterance" begins with a video and the response can be video or commentary). And therefore social software designers have to attend as much to the enabling of talk and interaction, on the page and over time, as they to do the elements of traditional web development.

Check out the white paper if any of this is interesting. It runs over much of my theoretical framework and then dives headlong into the organization of content into modules and lists, top tens, most viewed members, and all of the other means of social content organization.

My next white paper, coming this month I hope, will feature new uses of links and relationships at the social as well as object or data level. My sense is that the link is no longer a document link but a view, a node if you will, and that the web 2.0 organization of social content and participation will increasingly permit users to pull together people or pages depending on their preferences, affinities, interests, and so on. And that those, stored within and across social media networks, will create vast opportunities for commercial systems to learn about the associations that make sense and which layer onto objects and data a social and personal appeal. At which point social marketing and relationship marketing ought to really take off, and social interaction design with it.

Social Interaction Design guides and White Papers
Social Software theory Reading Notes


Adrian Chan, blogging, design, media, interaction design, social interaction design, social media, social network, social software, sociology, tagging, user generated web 2.0, web

Some sociology on the coupling of social media and mass media

Reading Notes: Social Media, Mass Media PDF, 45 pages

The Reality of the Mass Media, by Niklas Luhmann, and Anthony Giddens' Modernity and Self Identity together provide a rich basis for unpacking how online media, and social media (user generated content) in particular, couple with the mass media. Each observes the other, further extending and enriching the content of news, advertising, and entertainment through the participation of members of the audience on blogs, content aggregators, social networking sites, and even on recent hits like Youtube. These reading notes are theoretical in tone and substance, and are intended for those interested in social interaction design, especially in how it maps to theories of mass media and a sociology of the media's construction of a reality reproduced daily by social media users.

Reading Notes: Social Media, Mass Media PDF, 45 pages

From the reading notes summary ...


Social Software Design Notes (SxD)

Reading Notes on Modernity and Self Identity by Anthony Giddens and The Reality of Mass Media by Niklas Luhmann

Summary
These reading notes describe a systems-theoretical view of mass media and web and social media that posits a) that users, regardless of their individual intentions and interests, engage mass media in form and in content, and that b) the social web extends the domain and reach of mass media while also presenting it real challenges, and c) that this exchange occurs through the social practices of online communication and interaction as well as through the structural and functional coupling (e.g. business) of web media and mass media. In short, the social web offers users a chance to communicate and interact around cultural narratives, news and events as told by the mass media, and more without themselves belonging to the mass media, and the mass media, by observing this user generated content, can inform itself and adjust accordingly. But the social web and the mass media are doing more than observing one another (blogs on movies, cited in newspapers or on TV, and so on): the very forms in which many new online phenomena (call them social media, social software, web 2.0, etc.) take shape implicitly, if not explicitly, refer to forms of mass media communication. In other words, the social practices users engage in refer as much to the mass media as to daily social interactions. This, if it were accurate, would offer an interesting view of social media, for it would suggest that people understand and can engage with the online world through the mass media world and can make the mass media their own. To suggest that users don't simply take what they do in every-day life and adapt it to the online world, but refer also to the how content is produced on the radio, on TV, in films, in advertising for examples of form and representation if not also narrative construction and distinctions between truth and fiction, truthfulness and falsehoods, would be to suggest that the way forward for social interaction design should involve merging direct and immediate communication interests of individuals with the indirect or mediated means of production of media's abstract forms.

The above thesis is constructed in these reading notes from the sociologies of Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann. It offers a bridge from user-centric design to media theory and avoids the weak subject position common to many structuralist theories by suggesting that users put their understanding of the mass media to their own use. Mass media constructions of a world can equally serve individuals who, engaging in mediated communities and social interactions, need forms of representation with which to package their communication so that it can be understood by those who come across it. Unable to be there when communication occurs (online), users rely on the familiarity of packaging to provide context for their communication. Packaging provides the promise of control over the reception and interpretation of their communication. (Utterances uttered in face-to-face interactions don't serve users of online social media insofar was users can't be present online to utter the utterance in the presence of others in the first place.) And what better source of forms of presentation than the media, which invented the possibility of representational languages and systems in the first place? Media theory takes a functional view of mass media, claiming that the production of stories and events not only sustain business, industry, politics, law, and so on, but connect to consumers by producing news of interest to them. These reading notes suggest a view of new media that connects online and web media to mass media with the difference that users are involved in social practices that engage the Self in relations of trust and trust commitments. Seen from a business perspective, then, social media extend the fictions, and to some extent the functions, of realities constructed by mass media. This time, however, individual users are the systems' "producers," storytellers, journalists, and so on. Communication and interaction extend mass media distribution, and accelerate and extend the reproduction of news and events. Social media also contribute the truth and authenticity that belongs to interpersonal communication, and which can only be emulated by mass media.

Investigation
Social software systems vary in theme, or genre, as well as in their UI and design. Dating sites (match.com, eharmony.com) focus on personal information; their users are interested in people. Career networking sites (linkedin.com) focus on people also, but present the professional in the context of professional networks and histories. Both dating and career networking sites are thus biographical and representational. Myspace and Facebook also deal with people, but this time more actively than dating and career networking sites, for they not only capture social networks but produce them. In many ways they resemble interactive mass media: they're involved in creating social scenes, they spawn and promote bands, clubs, events, news, and so on. Blogging and discussion sites also engage in the creation of news, but this time emphasizing news, viewpoints, perspectives, and expertise more than member personality. There are recommendation sites and systems too, which tend to subordinate the biographical presentation of a person (e.g. personality and character) to the objects reviewed: books, movies, music, restaurants, web sites, travel, products, and so forth. All of these systems engage similar technologies, user interface techniques, and user practices. It seems highly likely that as users, our use of these sites is informed by our understanding not only of the genres of mass media programs, but also their means of production. In other words, we know something about how to present news, we get the difference between news and advertising, we know a lot about celebrities and why we're interested in them, what makes them popular, and how to talk about them. Social practices of social software use, in other words, are informed by existing mass media. But now we can participate in a world online that is coupled to the mass media through observation of it, at a minimum, and structurally, at a maximum (where social media are functionally, economically, and structurally coupled to the function, economics and structural organization of mass media). Mass media do not permit two-way communication with their audience; social media of course do. These reading notes cover two sociologists (Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann), whose work can help us unpack the social practices emerging around social software and social media within a higher-level analysis of mass media (media theory).




Technorati tags: blogging, information architecture, interaction-design, interaction design, media theory, meme, online advertising, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, social interaction design, social media, social network, social network marketing, social network strategy, social networking, social networking, social software, sociology, systems theory, television, user-experience, user experience, user generated, videos, viral, web 2.0, web-20, web, web2-0, web2.0, youtube,

Eric Berne's Games People Play and social media

I've been busy working on several papers lately... blogging's been sparse at best... here's the first of three of the papers... reading notes on Eric Berne's notion of the transaction and the emotional "stroke"... must rest...

From the reading notes:
Eric Berne's Games People Play, popular during its time but no less fascinating and perhaps even relevant to a theory of mediated interaction, is a wonderful reading of the transactions of emotional "strokes" among people interacting with one another. For Berne, human interaction is always engaged in this fundamental exchange (his theory is exchangist, I think), one that seems to have an effect on the body and on personal well-being as well as having its obvious effect on emotional and psychological dispositions. Though we would have to conjecture as to how human interaction can even communicate with biological systems, I see no reason to so here: it's pretty obvious that we are capable of making each other feel good, as we're capable of truly stressing each other out also. That our moods affect our health is well, just as obvious.

What then of the interactions that occur when we're not face to face? What of Berne's stroke? Let's, for the challenge of it, take this fuzzy but genuine insight, this notion that we communicate in order to provision ourselves and others with a feeling of membership and well-being that has no content itself but is instead the subtext of all content of communication, and map its transposition into mediated social interaction.


Reading Notes: Eric Berne's Games People Play PDF, 17 pages. Eric Berne's work on transactional analysis has long fascinated me for its insights into a dimension of interaction that involves basic emotional acknowledgment and recognition: a dimension that would seem diminished by the online interactions and communication that occur without face to face transactions, but which might nonetheless motivate our interactions nonetheless. If it were the case that online interactions attempt to get at the emotional stuff of life that's not immediately present, perhaps through substitute signs, gestures, the use of etiquette or other displacements and substitions, then we could claim that the online world is thin, but offers promise. A lot can be done with ASCII.

All my reading notes are here.

Technorati tags: folksonomy, information architecture, interaction-design, interaction design, psychology social media, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, interaction design, social interaction design, social media, social network, social network marketing, social network strategy, social networking, social software, sxd, tagging, user-experience, user experience, web 2.0, web-20, web 3.0, web, web2-0, web2.0,

The deep paradox of the link

I'm nearing release of some 120 pages of social interaction design material, all of it around the action domains and social practices, as well as design of content and action systems for social software (social media, or web 2.0, web 3.0) sites. Along the way, I've come upon a strange logical paradox in the form of the hyperlink. Here's how it goes. It seems to me now that we have no choice but to read social softgware as a form of autopoetic system....


The click is a yes, an affirmation, but is not an affirmation of what is represented in the links, given that links are explorative and that clicks are undifferentiated. The recursive logic by which we assess and interpret clicks means that we can only, at best, suppose that a click affirms what has been clicked.

Methodologically speaking, cessation of clicking would offer the surest sign that a link clicked has provided what the user seeks, but as we know such an interpretation would often provide us with a false positive. By extension, further clicking of links would seem to indicate that a link has not provided the user with his or her satisfaction, but that too would be to overburden observation and interpretation with a necessary and paradoxical bifurcation: that the clicking of any link might simultaneously represent its affirmation or rejection.

If we were to assume that action of clicking links affirms user intentions, then we would like to conclude that the user affirms the links clicked. However, the act of clicking is the means by which the user determines whether or not the links clicked are appropriate, and thus every act, or click, is ambiguous. Every click is ambiguous, and every link is ambivalent. This follows from the fundamental dual operation of the link: to serve as a means of navigation, or action (user's selection of the link by clicking) and the representation of an actionable medium within the same form. The possibilities of action are collapsed into form (the link), and at the same time intention of actions is deduced from form (its content, or meaning, or the link).

The link is a kind of utterance already uttered (it's shown as a picture or statement that is a clickable link); and yet in deducing user activity, we attribute the act of uttering it to the user who clicks it. Every impression measured is read as an expression of user action. Reading clickthroughs is tantamount to mapping a pedestrian's destination from the footprints he leaves behind while wandering about, lost. Clicks record what they have produced, and produce their own recordings.


Technorati tags: folksonomy, information architecture, interaction-design, interaction design, links social media, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, social interaction design, social media, social network, social network marketing, social network strategy, social networking, social software, sxd, tagging, user-experience, user experience, web 2.0, web-20, web 3.0, web, web2-0, web2.0,

What if mass media went away?

Here's a thought experiment:
What if the internet were to absorb mass media? What if radio and television were to disappear entirely, their services absorbed into the net, handled by a number of competing players all capable of combining radio, TV, video and pictures with email, IM, chat and so on? We can learn something about our mass media, and how internet media relate to mass media, just by conjuring up what would happen....

• We would notice their disappearance


• Radios would seem strangely disconnected


• A silence would be more than just quiet; it would feel like a death, something wrong


• We would miss familiar voices


• And yearn to hear old routines


• After a period of sending one another urls to videos hosted at YouTube (Gootube? Goodtube? Toggletube?) We might then wish to just be entertained, no searching, no streaming, no dialog boxes necessary


• We might miss the sense that something live is happening


• That we're all watching it together -- common culture and all of that


• That familiar voice, and the ham it up routine performed by our favorite DJs on the radio morning show we would miss hearing during our morning commute, not possibly but probably


• We'd miss the ease of sitting back and allowing the professionals to gather up the day's news, stamping them with significance or undermining them with tongue in cheek delivery


• I'm sure we'd also grow tired of the ongoing chore of making selection after selection


• And of being asked to view or click, listen to, or forward, items sent along by friends


• Not to mention strangers


• But after a while, perhaps, these things would fade,


• Live broadcasts might take root online,


• We could Skype into radio shows


• Hear ourselves back on podcasts released later in the day


• Watch ourselves on our webcams as we pose questions to off color news anchors


• And send those around later in the day


• When they appear in "members in the news" widgets on mytube.Sfgate.Com


• We might all benefit, we might each enjoy such a post-modernization, play-shifting and time-shifting mass media for easier consumption


• The question that occurs then being: how would our culture change?


• How would it look to us if playshifting eroded our scheduled routines, if we ceased to participate in activities on the basis of time and instead participated on the baseis of interest and need?


• If the centrifugal forces of mass media lost their power, would the state, a body with fewer organs (state organs, organs of power, organ-izing organs -- to quote Gilles Deleuze), find its way into new media?


• When scheduled media disappear, does culture lose its metronome?


• Does culture lose its rhythm? Or do journalists just lose their beats?

Technorati tags: analysis, p2p blogging, google video, internet radio, media, media theory, myspace, podcasting, social media, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, social interaction design, social media, social network, social network marketing, social network strategy, social networking, social software, videos online, vlogging, webocracy, Youtube,

Webocracy, Mass media, mini media, MySpace, YouTube

An article in today's SF Gate caught my eye. It's title included the word "Webocracy," so I knew right away that it must have to do with web 2.0, Silicon Valley, and the like. Like the term "folksonomy," "webocracy" captures the new in something old. In this case, democracy done online, retooled and perhaps even improved. Folksonomy, similarly, refers to a kind of social economy that bypasses traditional markets but which uses online markets and economies instead. I'm no fan of analogies used as explanations, especially when the new thing isn't well understood yet. Analogies refer us to something familiar -- in this case democracy and the web -- but the claim that this thing is like that thing has a communicative function but little more.

Let's unpack this one real quick then. Webocracy. Is the internet, and more specifically, the world of web 2.0, a new kind of democracy? It is grassrootsy, it does invite direct participation, it does threaten traditional modes of political engagement (e.g. bypass the lobby(ists), go straight to the back, where the power is...) but it's not a political system. The web is a communication and publishing technology, one that now delivers audio, video, and other modes of information and communication. But it's not just a technology. It's becoming an integral part of all manner of social phenomena (to wit, YouTube as the new TV, MySpace as the new marketing media). Technology plus culture give us new social practices.

It's the new techniques (technology = technique or application of a rationalized method) for communication that fascinate me, and the ones that seem to affect us at the core most of all. I don't think web 2.0 companies or phenomena represent a new political system, as might be suggested by the term webocracy. The same could be said for the term folksonomy. But there's a change of mode, of connection, of the relationship between individual and information, individual and individual, and individual and mainstream media taking place whose engine is web 2.0.

I call them talk systems. And where they get interesting is when they offer a marketplace, and they create an economy. I think those are the phenomena catching our attention these days: online markets in which economies based on recommendations and social networking create a different kind of consumption, one that is moved by communication between consumers instead of messaging and marketing by mainstream media. I call mySpace mini media, in opposition to mass media: it's got all the stuff off a medium, but its content is its own culture (a culture which often refers to mass media messages, images, events, celebs, etc.).

If you figure that a market simply makes goods and services available, and connections between buyers and sellers possible, but that an economy involves the people, their consumption habits, desires, choices, motives, etc, then clearly an online marketplace isn't enough to get anything going. It'll need users, and those users will need to know how the market works. It needs to exist, to find expression in common culture (it needs to be seen and talked about). So in addition to a market that connects goods, buyers and sellers, and an economy to organize the people and their economic consumption (note that an online dating service has a market, and an economy), the system has to be seen, has to exist. Here's where "mini media," or online phenomena like YouTube and MySpace, veer off from the phenomenon of mass media to launch something new: they exist through the communication of their members.

So where traditional mass media use magazines, newspapers (e.g. print media), radio, and television, all of which broadcast their messages, these new web -based media reproduce themselves through communication among members. Like other media, they exist by observing themselves, but these observations are given us not by pundits, djs, hosts, anchors, journalists... Observations of the medium are produced as ratings, votes, tags, bookmarks, blog posts, comments, etc. A very simple flow gets going (it's been called viral but it's got nothing to do with viruses. viruses are duplicated perfectly when transmitted. communication doesn't work that way, it has to be compelling if it is to circulate). That flow is an economy, one that picks up signs, assigns value, has speeds and crowds...

Talk, talk, talk, is the observation mode of web media. User participation. Social interaction. Instant messaging, posts, comments, email to friends, forward, bookmark, tag and rate, vote, vote, vote. What does all that do? It assigns value, assigns value. It's a different medium: a mini medium in comparison to the mass media (if you think money), a medium that for the most part serves as commentary on and observation of the mass media (hence its value to marketers), and which is "susceptible" to its own delusions, rumors, gossip, trends, and wipeouts. YouTube and MySpace are not produced by corporations, they don't occur over those media (radio, print, tv). It's no accident that these phenomena have remained where they are: online. That's where they can lay claim to a new social practice: the talk system. And perhaps the talk marketplace, the talk economy. (The term is social media, social software, but the social is talk).




Technorati tags: analysis, p2p andrew keen, christopher alexander, google video, internet democracy, long tail, media, media theory, myspace, social media, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, social interaction design, social media, social network, social network marketing, social network strategy, social networking, social software, videos online, webocracy, Youtube


(cross posted in my culture blog also)
related:
Myspace as mini media

YouTube: videos are signs, watching is social

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, writes:

"What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs."

To say that YouTube is not just video hosting or video watching is stating the obvious. The social participation YouTube gets in the video posting, commenting, rating, and circulating is what made it the killer app of hosted video. It is precisely YouTube's popularity that set it apart, and earned it the ability command a huge acquisition fee (read: head count. It was the audience head count, which to Google looked impressively like loyalty, and they may be right, which is why they'll leave it as YouTube for a while and keep their little "video NEW!" link sandwiched between images and news)...

I asked in a recent post what the content of YouTube is, using McLuhan's formula that a medium's content is a previous medium: "This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the 'content' of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” Then if the content of YouTube is television, its value was measured in terms of audience share (not advertising or programming quality). YouTube was clearly the biggest of the online video networks.

If the content of YouTube was television, but modified because it is online, then its formal content was television, its content as substance is viewers (users). And why is this so important? Because it would be a mistake to see YouTube in terms of its core value proposition: watching video. YouTube is a communication medium, and its real value lies in providing a marketplace "in" which people gather to pass around videos they like. "Watch this, you'll like it" is conversation. It's a statement, and YouTube is full of them. Look up Robin Williams and the first page of results are all the same 2 min and 19 second clip of Mr Williams doing a Scotsman inventing Golf. Why? Because posting is, as we learned from blogging, the fundamental act of communicating. Not reading. Not watching. (Not listening!)

This will all get more interesting as we look at the nature of utterances and communication involving video as reference. We need to compare YouTube and related phenomena to the blogosphere and to blogging. Ask yourself, what is it to refer to a cultural commodity or object, in a statement addressed to friends (or anonymously, to the world). What is that act? Is it a "look at this" act or is it a "look at me" act?

Or is it a "look at me looking at this" act? Let's suppose that the videos on YouTube are like commodities, and that they have the sign value that we associate with fast cars, exclusive brands, and other status symbols. I'm not suggesting of course that some YouTube videos better brands than others — videos aren't brands. I'm suggesting that videos signify social relations.

Videos on YouTube, because they are on YouTube, accrue social significance. That a person wants to share a video with somebody, be it by telling a friend or by posting, or by commenting, means that person likes it. And wants to communicate that like. In a "public" setting, identifying with a commodity carries social connotations. I'm into guitar rock. Or stand up. Check out these Bush out-takes. etc. Each video, in addition to its own content, has a reflective signification also: to like something is a reflection of my likes. The particular (video) makes a general reference (this is my taste). That's the social move. Association with videos can now become social, using the commodity form, as other commodities are social (the status symbols mentioned above). And they're free! Fast! And the consumption of them is ephemeral, and it doesn't oblige anyone to post one back, or to applaud, even to publicly agree.

The social works in online marketplaces like this by establishing a communicable interest between a user and his or her selections (books, videos, music, blogs, etc). If the interest were personal only, it wouldn't need to be communicable. It could just make sense to the person and end there. Its communicability is a sign that it's social. But in each medium, in each application (social software site, community, marketplace, etc) the site has to successfully create an audience/public, and successfully enable the linking of user to interests, and communication of these selections to individuals, groups, and the audience at large. One cannot really wait for the other. Hence the importance of viral marketing, and hence the advantage that has returned to first movers.

Our next investigation ought to be into the changing nature of sign value, of commodities as form and of our relations to each other through these mediators.


Technorati tags: Google YouTube
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Pay Attention to YouTube!

I'm on a bit of a Marshall McLuhan kick this week, with YouTube's acquisition to Google still in the air. And Kim Jong Il leaping up and down at the far eastern edge of the map: living, ridiculous proof that power is all about getting attention (Dumb and Dumber: starring Bush and Kim Jong Il). I don't think Robin Williams could've scripted a better skit; nor the South Park team have animated it any better than Kim did himself. Let's all pay attention to lonely wittle Kim Jong Il.

But back to our original news... YouTube. Why did Google take it when they had their own video service? Because Google's wasn't as popular. And why not? Because Google approached video as information. Youtube saw it as television.

This is not about videos, it's about television, and the future of television most importantly. Which will be why Sumner and Ballmer and Murdoch are still awake at night unsure of whether they just were too stingy. Marshall McLuhan claimed that television was a social medium. Film was not. YouTube is the present-day television, not television. YouTube, aptly named, since "You" (= My) and Tube (= Television) precisely describe television's reconfiguration in the Communication Age. Yes, and MyTube would've sounded a bit weird. But MyTube would've seemed a bit, well, narcissistic (ah, the truth about teenagers and MySpace is written in the name!). And it would've missed the function of Communication as it's applied to television. Since television is configured as a broadcast medium, it's reconfiguration is as a communication medium. MyTube would've missed the point. YouTube captures it: television communicates only if it's seen by others with whom one is communicating (namely, one's friends, or social network).

The social aspect of television is the reflection: to see others seeing what you're seeing. To share the experience of watching. Well, we don't often watch television that way any more. Sharing couches and armchairs, turned and tuned into the same network broadcast, primetime, dinner tray, dog splayed out on the floor thinking it's all about him. We live in a play-shifted, time-shifted day and age in which communication is as likely to happen asynchronously as it is to happen at all: that is, over the internet and not face to face. YouTube is about watching socially, but of course from one's own computer, out of synch in time, but in synch in terms of the content.

Google missed this because Google saw video as indexable, searchable, categorizable and taggable content. Flickr misses this because photos aren't social (they're a show and tell, which is a bit different because it takes the form of speaker/audience, not broadcast/audience). I watch you watching television. Television directs vision to itself but in the social context of watching together. There's always at least a peripheral perception of others watching (Not in film -- room's too dark. Social's not the point there. In fact movies open with a warning to turn off your cell phone. Most definitely not social...ah, but the experience is social, yes. But not the medium.).

The new generation doesn't sit down to watch prime time tv together. It's on YouTube, which provides the asynchronicity of experience, personaliz-ability of tags, uploading, favorites lists, channels, and a play duration much better suited to consumption than tv. Content in minutes, not half hour blocks. And played, of course, over the medium that's mine, that's mobile, that's interactive, and that's connected: the computer.

Google bought YouTube. Makes perfect sense.


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Marshall McLuhan on YouTube

There's a great scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall in which Allen, overhearing a guy in line for a movie refer to Marshall McLuhan, produces McLuhan with the words "as a matter of fact, I have Marshall McLuhan right here." It's a hilarious bit of comedy. I can't produce McLuhan, but I did find him on YouTube.com. I looked for him on YouTube because I wanted to quote McLuhan's theory that every medium has a prior medium as its content. I've been thinking about which medium YouTube has as its prior content (more on this soon). To find McLuhan as content on YouTube, is, well, a bit Annie Hall... (sorry, it's not the *real* McLuhan but only a trailer for a History channel special... the comparison deepens... is the internet a parallel medium to tv? Is an actor playing mcluhan in a video on youtube about a television program about a man who said the content of television is theater a simulation of the real thing quoted in a communication medium or a message circulated in the mass media sampled by a consumer and posted to the mini media or a marketing ploy by the mass media or is it simply the content of my post? things get strange in the mediated world...)

So, which medium is the content of YouTube?

"The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the 'content' of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph." Understanding Media, p 8.





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